Western investment is usually assumed to walk hand-in-hand with the democratic values of its home countries, and indeed, opening an economy to outside money is one of the textbook steps in a shift from authoritarianism to an open society.
— Chrystia Freeland
It's good to be good at playing defence, but the best defence is a strong offence.
I think Obama and the economists around him have a very sophisticated understanding of both globalization and the technology revolution and the impact they're having on the world economy and they way they're creating these winner-take-all spirals.
What is interesting is that, although it is framed as a war between the elites and Main Street, the Tea Party is actually really good for the elites.
One thing America gets right is being open to innovation. Canada and Scandinavia have to do better on that.
The hollowing out of the middle class. That's not just about capitalism or the structure of taxation. That is also about the fundamental truth that machines can do a lot of things better than humans used to do. A lot of those people are being pushed down to do less value-adding jobs, so they get paid less money.
We in Canada are not going to say Muslims are worse than Christians or are worse than Jews or are worse than atheists.
I interviewed Putin himself in 2000, shortly after he took over as president.
Environmentally friendly business practices have long been mainstream, particularly when they create a brand advantage, as with organic foods.
Oil could complicate domestic politics in countries with too much of it - there is a reason economists talk about 'the curse of oil,' and dictatorships have thrived in countries with abundant natural resources.
When you think of technological revolution, you probably think of geeks in cool coastal spaces like the Google campus, or perhaps of math wizards on Wall Street. But one source of rural prosperity is the adoption of radical new technologies - and a consequent surge in productivity.
Social media now make it easier to organize protest movements, even - or perhaps especially - in authoritarian regimes.
As companies become bigger, the global environment more competitive, and the rate of disruptive technological innovation ever faster, the value to shareholders of attracting the best possible CEO increases correspondingly.
The high-tech, globalized capitalism of the 21st century is very different from the postwar version of capitalism that performed so magnificently for the middle classes of the Western world.
Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.
People don't just want to be rich and successful, they want to be good.
It's public knowledge that there have been efforts - as U.S. intelligence sources have said - by Russia to destabilize the U.S. political system. I think that Canadians and, indeed, other Western countries should be prepared for similar efforts to be directed at us.
If you believe in democracy, the overreach of leaders is a good reminder that vigorous public debate and time-consuming due process are not only more fair and more just, but that over the long term they usually produce better government, too.
Sometimes who is going to be taking care of all of my kids on any given day is more complicated than any trade agreement.
If you've developed an ideology that what's good for you personally also happens to be good for everyone else, that's quite wonderful because there's no moral tension.
If the Tea Party gets its way, there will be less government - which is great for the elites. They don't need the government.
When I was a kid in junior high, I had an assignment to discuss how to rescue poor people in India. I remember my teacher at the time considered it an impossible problem. Now, we're not talking that way anymore. We're sure not talking about that for China. They're rescuing themselves thanks to globalization.
It's important to remember that, in the 1930s, a lot of people in the West looked at communism as a pretty good idea. That was partly because they didn't know how bad things were on the communist side of the world, but it was also partly because things were bad in the West.
My mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany before the family immigrated to western Canada. They were able to get visas thanks to my grandfather's older sister, who had immigrated between the wars.
I think of myself as a Russophile. I speak the language and studied the nation's literature and history in college.
The tragedy of 9/11 and the bloody scrambling-up of the Middle East were painful reminders that the world had not yet reached any end-of-history ideal. But these events mattered less to the assumptions and strategies of huge multinational companies than one might guess.
One of the great, and largely forgotten, triumphs of American society and government has been how smoothly U.S. farmers and their communities negotiated the creative destruction of the early 20th century and emerged triumphant when it was over.
Urbanites may picture farmers as hip heritage-pig breeders returning to the land, or a struggling rural underclass waging a doomed battle to hang on to their patrimony as agribusiness moves in. But these stereotypes are misleading.
One consequence of Russia's klepto-capitalist model is the growing appeal of government jobs, with their lucrative opportunities for payoffs.
Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality - financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico.
I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium.
Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic.
In America, we have equated personal business success with public virtue.
The one source of criticism even the most repressive authoritarian leader cannot silence is the outside world. Autocrats are usually thin-skinned and like to be admired, so at least, at first, they often seek to be praised abroad.
When Canada works to counter extremism and terrorism, particularly in the Middle East, Israel is always a natural partner and a close ally.
The progressives like to talk a lot about poverty - and you should. However, it's the guys in the middle who have really been hurt by the global economy . The people at the bottom have been holding on to their jobs quite well, actually.
A thing that really troubles me about a more polarized society is that you stop having a sense of society and citizenship.
This globalization is lifting up hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The Left needs to see that.
Our culture is a very diverse one, and I think now it is incredibly dangerous and very wrong to persecute Muslims and say there is something wrong with being a Muslim.
My late mother moved back to her parents' homeland in the 1990s when Ukraine and Russia, along with the thirteen other former Soviet republics, became independent states. Drawing on her experience as a lawyer in Canada, she served as executive officer of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO she helped to found.
In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder. It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global economy.
The challenge of weaning ourselves off fossil fuel even as it becomes more abundant will make the old fights about energy conservation seem like child's play.
Fancy GPS systems and space-age tractors are what most excite the farmers I know and astound their city friends.
Twitter-lutionaries are good at toppling regimes, but in the Mideast and North Africa, they're losing out to the Islamists, who've built protest movements the old-fashioned way. And in Moscow, the Mink revolutionaries, who are united by Live-Journal but not much else, were easy for Putin to outmaneuver.
Executive pay has skyrocketed for many reasons - including the prevalence of overly cozy boards and changing cultural norms about pay - but increasing scale, competition, and innovation have all played major roles.
Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth.
In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult.
This notion that borders wouldn't matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.
I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.
