I was in Mexico City. It's a very pleasant city in many ways. It's vibrant, lively, pretty exciting society, but also depressing in other ways, and sometimes almost hopeless, you know. So it's a combination of vibrancy and, I wouldn't say despair, but hopelessness, you know. Doesn't have to be, but it is. I mean, there is almost no economy.

My proposal happens to be very mainstream.

Mexico is a pretty poor country, but they are maintaining a free, high quality public education system, not for everyone of course but pretty substantial.

There is a phrase in trade theory; it's called "kicking away the ladder." First you violate the rules - the market rules - and then by the time you succeed in developing, you kick away the ladders so others can't do it too, and you preach about "free trade."

The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone.

What is failure for some is success for others. It depends on where they stand in the struggles over "democratic governance" and related rights - civil, social and economic, and broadly cultural, to adopt the framework of the Universal Declaration that is formally endorsed but constantly undermined.

The intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to . . a faceless professional.