TED is certainly a gathering of an incredibly eclectic, incredibly interesting community, but it's also an elite community - at least an important portion comes from that global 1%.
I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium.
I see real opportunities for us to have stronger, closer collaboration between the three North American partners and seize on opportunities to achieve objectives of more jobs and growth.
Our battle over the size of the state overlooks a problem that is just as important and that may be easier to muster the collective will to resolve: how effective government is, regardless of its scale.
Oil could complicate domestic politics in countries with too much of it - there is a reason economists talk about 'the curse of oil,' and dictatorships have thrived in countries with abundant natural resources.
I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.
Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But, looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss.
Twitter-lutionaries are good at toppling regimes, but in the Mideast and North Africa, they're losing out to the Islamists, who've built protest movements the old-fashioned way. And in Moscow, the Mink revolutionaries, who are united by Live-Journal but not much else, were easy for Putin to outmaneuver.
Defending human rights should be an important objective of foreign policy, and that, too, will sometimes be hard to reconcile with an economic agenda, especially when it comes to dealing with rich but repressive players like China and Russia.
Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic.
The progressives like to talk a lot about poverty - and you should. However, it's the guys in the middle who have really been hurt by the global economy . The people at the bottom have been holding on to their jobs quite well, actually.
One of the most important political and economic facts of this young century is that capital has been slipping the traces of the nation-state. Business is global; government is national.
What is interesting is that, although it is framed as a war between the elites and Main Street, the Tea Party is actually really good for the elites.
Plutocrats worldwide have readily understood the advantages of evading the burdens of the nation-state.
Plutocrats were the chief beneficiaries of so-called neoliberalism and the suite of political changes it brought beginning in the late 1970s - deregulation, weaker protection for unions, the shareholder value movement, and the subsequent inflation of executive compensation.
It's public knowledge that there have been efforts - as U.S. intelligence sources have said - by Russia to destabilize the U.S. political system. I think that Canadians and, indeed, other Western countries should be prepared for similar efforts to be directed at us.