In the nearer term, the likeliest source of risk is a conflict between China and the U.S. These are now the two largest economies in the world, and the combination of their economic interdependence, the sharp differences in their political and economic values, and the growing divergence in their interests makes this relationship potentially dangerous for everyone who might be affected by it - which means pretty much everyone.

It's very hard for someone who makes $1,000 a year or some who makes less than $1 a day to care about the environment.

Everything today is "transient." Technology and its ability to empower actors large and small evolve so quickly that we have to get used to living in a world that exists in a more or less constant state of flux.

The government has to be on the side of the people if the corporations take too much power.

Sometimes you check things off because you've done them. If you aren't checking stuff off your bucket list, you aren't living very well.

Deeper state intervention in an economy means that bureaucratic waste, inefficiency and corruption are more likely to hold back growth.

The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regime's safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins.