There exist better models of decisionmaking, for the governance of states, corporations and other large organizations, for example in Germany. We need to study such models and promising pathways on which our existing decisionmaking procedures can be gradually reformed.

Poverty persists, essentially, because the people at the bottom - the bottom quarter and also the bottom half - see the gains from the rising global average income wiped out by severe declines in their relative share.

Whatever we, as prospective participants unaware of our specific features, would desire society to be like is what, morally speaking, we ought to institute.

Severe poverty is getting better by some measures, but it's also becoming ever more scandalous because it is now so easily avoidable.

Economists operate with this image of the homo economicus, the rational economic agent, and while such agents are rare in the wider world, they are common in economics departments. Exemplifying the homo economicus paradigm, economists typically choose their research projects and hypotheses so as to promote their own careers, to maximize their lifetime income. This explains the astonishing pressures toward conformity in academic economics: how deviant views (except those by a few who have already achieved stardom) get crushed by an army of conformists.

Domestic power structures are shaped in good part by global arrangements.

Critical journalism has gone out of fashion, or rather, it has been bought out. And so, we have much less of it than we did during the Vietnam era, where there was very critical reporting on the Vietnam War and a lot of disagreement among the media. Now you find that the media are much more homogenous, converging because they all must cater to the same community of advertisers. It's sad to see.