Noreena Hertz Quotes

Noreena Hertz

Profession : Author

Birth : September 24, 1967

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.

Noreena Hertz

We live increasingly in a world of haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable riches. Some enjoy rights that are completely denied to others. Relative inequalities are exploding, and the world's poorest, despite all the advances of globalisation, may even be getting poorer.

Noreena Hertz

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.

Noreena Hertz

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.

Noreena Hertz

What about those who help growth indirectly, those who stay at home and look after others - mothers, carers of elderly parents or sick relatives who save the state millions of pounds annually. What is their worth? How is their value to be determined?

Noreena Hertz

If somebody tweets 'I like Coca-Cola,' does that mean that they're actually going to buy Coca-Cola? One can? Two cans? Three cans? If they retweet someone else's Tweet, does that mean they're going to buy it?

Noreena Hertz

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.

Noreena Hertz

All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.

Noreena Hertz

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.

Noreena Hertz

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.

Noreena Hertz

The World Trade Organization is an organization that defends trade interests. I think the problem is less that they exist. The problem is that internationally we've only got an organization that protects trade interests. Surely we need some kind of counterweight to protect human rights and the environment, too.

Noreena Hertz

It is a world of extremes, which can be characterised most clearly in terms of exclusion. That means political exclusion, whereby the rights of citizens are marginalised by the interests of big business: George W Bush's environmental policy, for example, is clearly formulated in the interests of U.S. energy companies.

Noreena Hertz

We are all socialists now, it seems. John McCain, David Cameron and Gordon Brown attack bankers' irresponsible behaviour and salaries, and call for state intervention in the financial markets. But these calls will not get them elected or re-elected if they are addressed only to the banking sector.

Noreena Hertz

Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people.

Noreena Hertz

Without industry, finance and government consciously and collaboratively ensuring that capital flows to where it is needed in order to ensure the scaling up of climate change solutions, whatever deal is agreed risks never being realised.

Noreena Hertz

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.

Noreena Hertz

Transparency, accountability and sustainability have become the slogans of the market leaders. Companies carry out environmental and social audits to court the consumer, and even the bluest chips woo organisations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty.

Noreena Hertz

People are looking for certainty. The more complex the world becomes, the more people look for people to give them certainty and tell them what to do. During the past few years of actively thinking about this, there is one thing that I have accepted: certainty is not out there. There is not one strategy to follow, and that's OK.

Noreena Hertz

We are beginning to see a fundamental outrage at the whole interconnected mess of a system: at energy companies who record massive profits, yet allow pensioners to struggle to stay warm in winter; at CEOs who can earn up to a 1,000 times the salary of their average worker; and soon, any day now, at those politicians who allowed this to happen.

Noreena Hertz

In an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do.

Noreena Hertz