Quotes from Geoff Mulgan

Computing should be taught as a rigorous - but fun - discipline covering topics like programming, database structures, and algorithms. That doesn't have to be boring.

The most dynamic cities have always been immersed in the critical innovations of their time.

Governments should want and even crave the best possible scientific advice. With reliable knowledge come better decisions, fewer mistakes and more results achieved for each pound spent.

Conflicts are never caused in any simple way by identity, culture or economics. Where resources are scarce, or there are strong historical memories of conflict, small events are more likely to inflame passions.

There is a yearning for people to return to elementary moral virtues, such as integrity and commitment. We distrust people who have no centering of values. We greatly respect businessmen, for example, if they display those virtues, even if we don't necessarily agree with the people.

Democratic nation states remain far more capable of managing the circuit of coercion, taxation and legitimation than any transnational bodies.

So is civil society prepared for the future? Probably not. Most organisations have to live hand to mouth, juggling short-term funding and perpetual minor crises. Even the bigger ones rarely get much time to stand back and look at the bigger picture. Many are on a treadmill chasing after contracts and new funding.

With a fractured sense of self, we come to depend on what people feed back to us - often mediated through social networks - not what we are. We have complex identities but may become less able to act as a subject - confident in what we really are.

Big business increasingly likes to portray itself as socially concerned, adopting the style of civic action through 'campaigns' of varying degrees of cynicism.

Societies can easily talk themselves into conflict and misery. But they can also talk, and act, their way out.

Societies advance through innovation every bit as much as economies do.

Predation is part of the everyday life of capitalism, in sectors as mainstream as pharmaceuticals, software and oil - where people's money, their data, their time and their attention are routinely taken in fundamentally asymmetrical exchanges.

Democracy isn't solely about polite conversations in parliaments. It needs to be continually refreshed with raw passions, anger and ideals.

Lots of creativity is and should be solitary.

States which used to communicate directly to their citizens now do so through the media, where their messages are reshaped by the logics of news values and commentary.

Teenagers learn best by doing things, they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real — all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does.

The central position of finance capital is going to come to an end, and it's going to steadily move to the sides, the margins of our society, transformed from being a master into a servant, a servant to the productive economy and of human needs.

the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

at a societal level there is a surprising shortage of institutions designed to judge what really works and which ideas deserve to be backed with resources. Markets play this role for commercial ideas. But ideas that could be socially valuable often struggle to find support, even when there is strong evidence that they work.

Forty percent of our social interactions happen with 5 other people, and 60 percent with only 15 others. It's hard to have a sustained conversation with more than 4 people. It's hard for an intensely committed group to be much more than 12 in number. And somewhere around 150 is a typical upper size for a close-knit community.

One study of twenty years of data in the United States concluded that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."4

The end of life is likely to be an important focus for innovation. Most people die in hospitals, tied up with tubes and with their bodies pumped full of drugs. Yet most would rather die at home and with more control over the timing and manner of their death.

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

A modest dose of self-love is entirely healthy - who would want to live in a world where everyone hated themselves? But taken too far it soon becomes poisonous.