Noreena Hertz Quotes

The problem lies with us: we’ve become addicted to experts. We’ve become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom.

Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such ‘imagine if’ questions… we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.

Debt vultures are really the scum at the bottom of the pond. These are guys who buy up the debts of the world’s poorest countries on the secondary market. You can go buy debts of a country like Peru, for example, at a real discount. Why? Because people think that the debts won’t be repaid.

With clothing being designed that allows you to be hugged virtually, video conferencing becoming ever sharper, and our social and romantic lives increasingly taking place online, the gap between the physical and the virtual is getting ever smaller.

When Apple introduced its game-changing iPhone in 2007, Nokia was caught sleeping on the job. Although it had actually developed an iPhone-style device – complete with a color touchscreen, maps, online shopping, the lot – some seven years earlier. Astonishingly, it never released the product.

Women who have managed to get successful normally have had to carve out pretty much their own route for doing it, because there are few roadmaps for how, as a woman, you become successful. You think about having to do it yourself, you carve your own way. Does that relate to being Jewish?

My parents were entrepreneurs. I grew up believing in the power of innovation.

Back in the 1970s, Kodak tried to give $25m to a black civil rights organisation in Rochester, New York. The company’s shareholders rose up in arms: making this politically charged offering wasn’t the reason they had entrusted Kodak with their money. The donation was withdrawn.

Errors in decision-making lead young people to under-save for retirement, doctors to miss tumours, CEOs to make catastrophic investments, governments to engage in needless wars, and parents to irreversibly traumatize their children.

As an economist specializing in the global economy, international trade and debt, I have spent most of my career helping others make big decisions – prime ministers, presidents and chief executives – and so I’m all too aware of the risks and dangers of poor choices in the public as well as the private sphere.

From solar to electric cars, from geothermal to reconfiguring the grid, the scale of investment needed in green technologies in order to meet whatever agreements on emissions reductions are finally agreed will be immense.

I really believe in a globalist agenda, but globalization isn’t just allowing companies to trade freely all over the world. It’s about what types of rights and responsibilities come with that.

It’s not that I am against the rich giving money to charities. I’m all for it, and we should think of ways of encouraging more of it. But I also believe that states, rather than individuals, are ultimately a better bet for delivering a fair and just world and reconciling differing interests.

Language is too complex for a computer to understand. It’s not going to be able to make sense of what people are saying en masse. We need a new type of discipline that puts together computer scientists and social scientists, who can add context to the situation.

It’s actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.

Terrorism and trade cannot be the only issues on which the world unites. We must commit ourselves to a global coalition to deal with exclusion, too.

I was – the last protest I was at was in Genoa, where I got tear gassed, and I hate tear gas, and I hate being in crowds.

Most of us are going through life without interrogating whether our decision-making processes are fit for purpose. And that’s something we need to change – especially when the stakes are high and the decisions are of real import.

Most of us are ‘ultraconformists’ when it comes to who we are most likely to follow… to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire.

Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.

I try to take a weekly digital Sabbath, batch my emails so I deal with them a few times a day rather than constantly, and increasingly give myself permission to ignore unsolicited communiques. I try, too, to give others more slack. The respond-now culture is a two-way street. I’m trying to be more mindful of that.

The term ‘glass ceiling’ was coined in 1984. More than 20 years later, the ceiling has barely cracked. There isn’t a single country in the world that has as many female as male politicians. In business, the situation is even worse. Its highest echelon – the board – remains a chauvinist’s dream.

Forcing companies to recruit away from the golf course might lead to the appointment of more women from NGOs and academia and medicine, all of whom are likely to understand such concepts as stewardship and sustainability much better than men picked from the usual hunting grounds.

The challenge for corporations, if offices were to become obsolete, is twofold. How will they be able to retain their distinct cultures? And how will they be able to ensure that all employees, wherever they work from, share a united identity and vision?

What my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps; that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition; that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus.

Child labour may be distasteful to westerners, but does boycotting goods made with child labour improve or exacerbate the lot of third world children? Trusting the market to regulate may not ultimately be in our interest.

With consumers having ever more choice, corporations must invest more and more in courting public opinion.

So key for making smart decisions is a mindset that actively monitors and is open to shifting tides and new information, one that is acutely aware that the interplay between our environment and its outcomes is ever in flux.

Philanthropists today want input into how their monies are being deployed. The big question is, can governments use this insight to sell the rich the idea of paying more tax rather than spend more on charitable giving?

Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it’s skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.

Stress makes us prone to tunnel vision, less likely to take in the information we need. Anxiety makes us more risk-averse than we would be regularly and more deferential.

If power lies more and more in the hands of corporations rather than governments, the most effective way to be political is not to cast one’s vote at the ballot box, but to do so at the supermarket or at a shareholders’ meeting. When provoked, corporations respond.

I have problems with this very extreme form of capitalism where the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, where the focus is completely on the short term, and no one is thinking about the consequences.