What is Big Think?

We are Big Idea Hunters…

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.

Big Think Features:

12,000+ Expert Videos

Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.

Watch videos

World Renowned Bloggers

Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.

Go to blogs

Big Think Edge

Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.

Find out more

Transcript

Question: How can we credibly commit to not bailing out any more large firms?

Eliot Spitzer: Only by making them smaller. In other words, the “too big to fail” problem is at the heart of this and the institutions that got too big to fail that were overleveraged, that had a federal guarantee could again, absorb risk in their investment portfolio with the knowledge that if things went bad, they weren’t going to pay the price, taxpayers would. So, at the point of crisis, we couldn’t let the banks all fail because then we would have had a depression. So, there was an imperative to get cash into the system to ensure the solvency of the banks. The question is, what did we do in return? What did we get back from them? And that’s where Geithner and Summers failed. They didn’t ask for anything back. It was at that point we should have said. The nature of your investment portfolio has to change. What you do with the money has to change. And the size of the institution has to be limited. And so, that is the reform that we’re talking about.

You know, a lot of screaming and shouting about passing bills, giving enforcers more power. Enforcers didn’t need more power; they just needed to use the power they already had. And I think that is evident, not only from the cases that we made when I was Attorney General, but what they have been able to do over the past year. There hasn’t been a new law passed giving the Fed and other institutions more power. They finally woke up to the fact that they needed to use it. So, hopefully that is where we’re headed.

Recorded January 21, 2010
Interviewed by Austin Allen