Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy.
The world needs banking but it does not need banks.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that while the functions of banking are essential for society, the traditional bank institutions may not be necessary.
Bill Gates' quote highlights the distinction between the services that banks provide and the traditional banking institutions themselves. He argues that the financial services are important for the functioning of the economy, but new technologies and innovations may be able to fulfill these roles without relying on the conventional banking structure, implying a need for change in how we consider financial services in the modern world.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the future of finance during a seminar on fintech.
More from Bill Gates
All quotes βThe Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.
With the states release today of a set of clear and consistent academic standards, our nation is one step closer to supporting effective teaching in every classroom, charting a path to college and careers for all students, and developing the tools to help all children stay motivated and engaged in their own education. The more states that adopt these college and career based standards, the closer we will be to sharing innovation across state borders and becoming more competitive as a country.
About three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.
These four policy prescriptions - strengthening educational opportunities, revamping immigration rules for highly skilled workers, increasing federal funding for basic scientific research, and providing incentives for private-sector R&D - should in my view be top priorities as Congress and the Administration consider how to maintain the nation's leadership in science, technology, and innovation.
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In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.
That economic decisions are made without certain knowledge of the consequences is pretty self-evident. But, although many economists were aware of this elementary fact, there was no systematic analysis of economic uncertainty until about 1950.
To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.
History proves... that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.
Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.