Economic activity is no longer an adversarial contest between embattled sellers and buyers "In the distributed economy, where collaboration trumps competition, inclusivity replaces exclusivity and transparency and openness to others becomes essential to the new way of conducting business, empathic sensibility has room to breathe and thrive. It is no longer so constrained by hierarchies, boundaries of exclusion, and a concept of human nature that places acquisitiveness, self-interest, and utility at the center of the human experience."
Jeremy RifkinPresident Obama, I voted for him. I think he's a mature politician, but here's what happened. Obama wanted a green economy. He spent billions of dollars of tax money to create a green economy and it didn't happen. The question is why.
Jeremy RifkinStarvation does not occur because of a world food shortage. If everyone ate a vegetarian, or better still, a vegan diet there would be enough food for everyone. The only sane way forward is to grow food for humans rather than to feed it to farmed animals.
Jeremy RifkinWe now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.
Jeremy RifkinThey're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.
Jeremy RifkinMany of the mainstream agricultural scientists, especially at the agricultural schools, but at all of our major universities, are tied into all sorts of contractual relationships and consulting relationships with the life science companies.
Jeremy RifkinCompanies that actually survive and flourish are going to change their business model from production to aggregating the networks and the network services and solutions. If you're a construction company or an IT company or a logistics company or an information data operation, to the extent that you can find ways to help build the commons, you can get some commercial value in that.
Jeremy Rifkin