We have this highly irrational system of incentivizing innovation for clean and green technologies, where we allow the innovator to have a temporary monopoly and then mark up the price of the product or sell licenses at high prices to those who want to use the kind of product that the innovator has invented. This system is collectively irrational because many people, to avoid the inflated prices of still-patented cleaner and greener technologies, opt for some older technology that is much more polluting.

We should not think of poverty eradication as a matter of collecting money and giving it to the poor so much as of reforming the global rules that are disadvantaging the poor and making it impossible for them to fend for themselves.

The state should never have instituted and enforced legal property rights in persons, and should not have been in the business of returning runaway slaves to their "rightful owners." The whole institution of property in human beings was an unjust social institution and should not have been maintained in existence. It is this sort of thought that I'm appealing to at the supranational level.

For the present system to work, poor people must be excluded from the innovation, because if they could get access at an affordable price, then affluent people would find ways to buy it cheaply as well - and then the innovator would be poorly rewarded and introductions of new medicines would decline.

To improve global health, it's not enough just to have a really good new product and to obtain marketing approval. You still need to market the product and bring it to patients, follow up, create the infrastructure, and so on - the whole pipeline, the network. That's something that companies are extremely good at: organizing a whole pipeline in a cost-effective way.

Economics is like a church, and it fulfills the same function the church had fulfilled for centuries: the justification of the status quo.

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.