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We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

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Transcript

Question: How can we fix our political and economic system?

Edward Crane: Well, I would want people to own their retirement plans. In most of the world, the government is in control of your retirement. And I think it would be good for the economies to have private savings, rather than these pay-as-you-go plans and good for people’s sense of independence that they’re not dependent on the government when they retire. I think that’s a very important initiative. I would do everything possible to eliminate nuclear weapons from the world. Everyone says, “Well, that’s impossible.” I don’t think it is, and I think these things are just so horrible that we don’t appreciate that Hiroshima, what happened at Hiroshima was nothing compared to what would happen if one of these nukes were detonated today. And so those are two initiatives, and keeping trade open, keeping dialogue between nations open. It’s just, the prejudices people have against each other are so stupid, and people are people.