Quotes from Klaus Schwab

A winner-takes-all economy that offers only limited access to the middle class is a recipe for democratic malaise and dereliction.

Business cycles naturally entail peaks and troughs in employment, and socially responsible businesses should follow successful examples like Coca-Cola, Alcoa, Saudi Aramco, Africa Rainbow Minerals, and Google in working toward mitigating joblessness and enhancing people's abilities to earn a livelihood.

An overwhelming number of economists, international civil servants, and policy-makers argue that a fragmentation of the Eurozone would cause a new depression and massive wealth destruction around the world. It would also end the period of economic integration that has characterized world politics since the end of the Cold War.

New technologies and approaches are merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that will fundamentally transform humankind. The extent to which that transformation is positive will depend on how we navigate the risks and opportunities that arise along the way.

As the physical, digital, and biological worlds continue to converge, new technologies and platforms will increasingly enable citizens to engage with governments, voice their opinions, coordinate their efforts, and even circumvent the supervision of public authorities.

New technologies, however remarkable they might seem, are fundamentally just tools made by people for people.

In Switzerland, we have a centuries-old tradition of living together in one confederation and one society. That holds us back from excesses. We are a civilized and enlightened community and, by practising multicultural tolerance, we manage to stop extreme developments from going too far.

Technology is going to revolutionize almost every sector, leading to the demise of many traditional professions. Economic and political power will be determined less by a country's size than by its technological superiority.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution can compromise humanity's traditional sources of meaning - work, community, family, and identity - or it can lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a sense of shared destiny. The choice is ours.

When you can't cope with change, you feel overwhelmed, and you look for a simple solution.

Of course, some people call me one of the most well-networked people in the world, but I am a very unsocial person - I never go to a cocktail party; I am never seen at a charity event. I have one exception: I'm a member of the board for one of the big European music festivals, so I participate, with pleasure, in concerts.

The changes are so profound that, from the perspective of human history, there has never been a time of greater promise or potential peril.

when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on the table between them or in their peripheral vision changes both what they talk about and their degree of connectedness.65

On the societal front, a paradigm shift is underway in how we work and communicate, as well as how we express, inform and entertain ourselves.

My concern, however, is that decision makers are too often caught in traditional, linear (and nondisruptive) thinking or too absorbed by immediate concerns to think strategically about the forces of disruption and innovation shaping our future.

This work indicates that the fourth industrial revolution is unique, driven as it is by a global network of smart (network-driven) cities, countries and regional clusters, which understand and leverage the opportunities of this revolution – top down and bottom up – acting from a holistic and integrated perspective.

The second industrial revolution has yet to be fully experienced by 17% of the world as nearly 1.3 billion people still lack access to electricity.

It may be too soon to tell, but extrapolating from current trends indicates that mobility will play an ever more important role in society and economics in the future than today:

As all these trends happen, the winners will be those who are able to participate fully in innovation-driven ecosystems by providing new ideas, business models, products and services, rather than those who can offer only low-skilled labour or ordinary capital.

Today, a middle-class job no longer guarantees a middle-class lifestyle, and over the past 20 years, the four traditional attributes of middle-class status (education, health, pensions and house ownership) have performed worse than inflation.

Shared understanding is particularly critical if we are to shape a collective future that reflects common objectives and values.

The sobering truth is that the heroes of the immediate COVID-19 crisis, those who (at personal risk) took care of the sick and kept the economy ticking, are among the worst paid professionals – the nurses, the cleaners, the delivery drivers, the workers in food factories, care homes and warehouses, among others.

The fact that a unit of wealth is created today with much fewer workers compared to 10 or 15 years ago is possible because digital businesses have marginal costs that tend towards zero.

The fourth industrial revolution, however, is not only about smart and connected machines and systems. Its scope is much wider. Occurring simultaneously are waves of further breakthroughs in areas ranging from gene sequencing to nanotechnology, from renewables to quantum computing. It is the fusion of these technologies and their interaction across the physical, digital and biological domains that make the fourth industrial revolution fundamentally different from previous revolutions. In