As a Londoner who delights in the capital's dynamism and diversity, I none the less agree with Ken Livingstone that London hosts too great a share of our national institutions. Where sensible, more should be located in other cities, particularly new or reformed institutions that involve new facilities.
It cannot suffice to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. It is necessary to change and improve our understanding of the true purpose of what we are and what we do in the world. Only such a new understanding will allow us to develop new models of behavior, new scales of values and goals, and thereby invest the global regulations, treaties and institutions with a new spirit and meaning.
Our marvelous new information technologies boost our power and opportunities for political engagement, but they can also disempower us by contributing to extreme political mobilization that sometimes overwhelms our institutions. These institutions were designed for rural societies operation at a tiny fraction of today's speed and with a citizenry vastly less capable that today's. It's unclear how they will change to adapt to the new reality, but change they must.
I have great, great confidence in our capital markets and in our financial institutions. Our financial institutions, banks and investment banks, are strong. Our capital markets are resilient. They're efficient. They're flexible.
Thus, the capital owner is not a parasite or a rentier but a worker - a capital worker. A distinction between labor work and capital work suggests the lines along which we could develop economic institutions capable of dealing with increasingly capital-intensive production, as our present institutions cannot.
It is not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, or new institutions. We must understand differently and more perfectly the true purpose of our existence on this earth.
We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions - like the banking institutions, and other institutions; if we redesign our policies, if we look back on our concepts, so that we have a different idea of poor people.
I sincerely believe that for the New York theatre to remain relevant, all our major producing institutions should be presenting new American plays.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from banks and other lenders, providing those financial institutions with capital to make new loans.
We can't have extraordinary dynamism, innovation, and change in the economy and expect to have predictability and stability in our personal lives. It's not as if there are these big, giant institutions existing between us and the economy. In fact, these institutions have become tissue-thin. There is no mediation anymore. We are the economy; the economy is us.
I think that really what our training, what our culture, our religious institutions, our educational and cultural institutions should be about is preparing the heart for that journey outside of the cage of the ribs.
Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise, and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.
Look at any financial institution, at any bank. They're all photocopies of each other. There's no diversity of institutions and even less diversity of currency. Therefore, just as you say its very logical that an ecosystem like this will collapse, it's very predictable a monetary system like this will collapse, too. And it hasn't finished collapsing, by the way.
I'm interested in institutions, particularly in the way institutions close ranks. They have hierarchies and their own ethics.
We desperately need some new thinking today about systems of global governance. We're stuck with the same obsolete, ignore-the-earth institutions that were brough into being after the 2nd World War, and they're now failing us ever more catastropically. Wild Law shows just how radical we now need to be in creating new institutions that are genuinely 'fit for purpose' in the 21st Century.
Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.
Fight less, cuddle more. Demand less, serve more. Text less, talk more. Criticize less, compliment more. Stress less, laugh more. worry less, pray more. With each new day, find new ways to love each other even more.