“People tend to form political beliefs in their early years and then stick with them for life. If today’s rich young are tomorrow’s thought leaders, democracy has a shaky future.” — Edward Luce Copy Share Image
“Davos has become the emblem of a global elite that has lost its ability to listen.” — Edward Luce Copy Share Image
“By any numerical measure, humanity is becoming rapidly less poor. But between half and two-thirds of people in the West have been treading water – at best – for a generation. Tens of millions of Westerners will struggle to keep their heads above the surface over the coming decades. The spread of automation, including artificial intelligence and remote intelligence, which… — Edward Luce Copy Share
“Cowen detects conformism even in the liveliest Silicon Valley companies. Most of its denizens wear some variation on the casual hipster uniform and all dutifully strip the paint off their office walls. They litter their workplaces with the same multicoloured pouffes. ‘We are using the acceleration of information transmission to decelerate changes in our physical world,’ writes Cowen. ‘Most Americans… — Edward Luce Copy Share
“It would also require a conscious effort to look at the world from unfamiliar standpoints and admit that the West has no monopoly on… — Edward Luce Copy Share Image
“Almost half of Americans would be unable to pay a $400 medical emergency bill without going into debt.67” — Edward Luce Copy Share Image
“In the US, the more liberal a city’s politics, the higher the rate of inequality.45” — Edward Luce Copy Share Image
“With chisels and pickaxes we made our tiny contributions to this orgy of historic vandalism.” — Edward Luce Copy Share Image
“the Toil Index – the number of working hours it takes a median worker to pay the median rent in one of America’s big… — Edward Luce Copy Share Image
“Today’s equivalent is probably ‘get an engineering degree’, but it will not necessarily be as lucrative. A third of Americans who graduated in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) are in jobs that do not require any such qualification.52 They must still pay off their student debts. Up and down America there are programmers working as office temps and… — Edward Luce Copy Share
“Shortly afterwards Addis Ababa launched a crackdown on its opponents that resulted in hundreds of deaths. If America’s president was in two minds about democracy, how was the rest of the world supposed to feel? It was on Obama’s watch that the tally of global democracies fell most sharply. The world now has twenty-five fewer democracies than it did at… — Edward Luce Copy Share
“Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, said that when societies hit a civilisational break the suicide rate soars.” — Edward Luce Copy Share Image
