Quotes from Noreena Hertz

Consumers, unlike voters, expect an immediate response to their concerns; and companies, unlike governments, do not have the luxury of a mid-term lull.

At the end of the day, philanthropy can only ever be an adjunct to what governments provide. And government coffers need to be replenished.

Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.

If power lies more and more in the hands of corporations rather than governments, the most effective way to be political is not to cast one's vote at the ballot box, but to do so at the supermarket or at a shareholders' meeting. When provoked, corporations respond.

It's actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.

We must embrace a new agenda based on inclusiveness; a commitment to reconnecting the social and the economic; a relinking of the latter to a plausible redistributive system; and a determination to ensure that everyone has access to justice. All these things are within our reach.

Rather than empowering all, consumer and shareholder activism gives greatest voice to those with the most money in their pockets, those who can switch from seller to seller with relative ease. Consumer and shareholder activism is a form of protest that favours the middle classes, an outpouring of the dissatisfaction of the bourgeoisie.

Back in the 1970s, Kodak tried to give $25m to a black civil rights organisation in Rochester, New York. The company's shareholders rose up in arms: making this politically charged offering wasn't the reason they had entrusted Kodak with their money. The donation was withdrawn.

Debt vultures are really the scum at the bottom of the pond. These are guys who buy up the debts of the world's poorest countries on the secondary market. You can go buy debts of a country like Peru, for example, at a real discount. Why? Because people think that the debts won't be repaid.

Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.

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.

We are living in a time in which movies such as 'Super Size Me' and 'An Inconvenient Truth' have made box-office history, and books such as 'No Logo' and my own, 'The Silent Takeover,' are bestsellers.

I try to take a weekly digital Sabbath, batch my emails so I deal with them a few times a day rather than constantly, and increasingly give myself permission to ignore unsolicited communiques. I try, too, to give others more slack. The respond-now culture is a two-way street. I'm trying to be more mindful of that.

Philanthropists today want input into how their monies are being deployed. The big question is, can governments use this insight to sell the rich the idea of paying more tax rather than spend more on charitable giving?

The challenge for corporations, if offices were to become obsolete, is twofold. How will they be able to retain their distinct cultures? And how will they be able to ensure that all employees, wherever they work from, share a united identity and vision?

Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.

I was - the last protest I was at was in Genoa, where I got tear gassed, and I hate tear gas, and I hate being in crowds.

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.

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.

I have problems with this very extreme form of capitalism where the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, where the focus is completely on the short term, and no one is thinking about the consequences.

With consumers having ever more choice, corporations must invest more and more in courting public opinion.

Language is too complex for a computer to understand. It's not going to be able to make sense of what people are saying en masse. We need a new type of discipline that puts together computer scientists and social scientists, who can add context to the situation.

What my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps; that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition; that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus.

It's possible that Generation Facebook, accustomed as it is to a whole range of experiences that it only imbibes online, doesn't have the same need for physical interaction in order to be creative as previous generations still do. It's possible that Generation Facebook can co-create and collaborate quite happily from afar.