Chrystia Freeland

We in Canada are not going to say Muslims are worse than Christians or are worse than Jews or are worse than atheists.

I think of myself as a Russophile. I speak the language and studied the nation\'s literature and history in college.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

The high-tech, globalized capitalism of the 21st century is very different from the postwar version of capitalism that performed so magnificently for the middle classes of the Western world.

TED is certainly a gathering of an incredibly eclectic, incredibly interesting community, but it\'s also an elite community - at least an important portion comes from that global 1%.

Fancy GPS systems and space-age tractors are what most excite the farmers I know and astound their city friends.

People don\'t just want to be rich and successful, they want to be good.

The triumph of economic liberalization has coincided with a sharp increase in income inequality.

The main point of democracy is to deliver positive results for the majority.

Most of the conversation about how geopolitics is changing in the 21st century focuses on the shift from west to east and on how we\'re moving from the bipolar power equation of the Cold War to a new bipolar relationship, that of the U.S. and China, that determines the mood music for everyone else.

Companies and capital operate internationally, often beyond the economic reach of any particular nation-state. People are pretty global, too, living lives that freely cross national borders.

As companies become bigger, the global environment more competitive, and the rate of disruptive technological innovation ever faster, the value to shareholders of attracting the best possible CEO increases correspondingly.

Thanks to globalization and the technology revolution, the nature of work, the distribution of the rewards from that work, and maybe even the economic cycle itself are being transformed.

Talking about income inequality, even if you\'re not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.

Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality - financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico.

Urbanites may picture farmers as hip heritage-pig breeders returning to the land, or a struggling rural underclass waging a doomed battle to hang on to their patrimony as agribusiness moves in. But these stereotypes are misleading.

My late mother moved back to her parents\' homeland in the 1990s when Ukraine and Russia, along with the thirteen other former Soviet republics, became independent states. Drawing on her experience as a lawyer in Canada, she served as executive officer of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO she helped to found.

Sometimes, the aftermath is more devastating than the storm. That is the story of the 2008 financial crisis. It was disastrous at the time, but what has been worse is how long it has lingered.

A thing that really troubles me about a more polarized society is that you stop having a sense of society and citizenship.

It\'s important to remember that, in the 1930s, a lot of people in the West looked at communism as a pretty good idea. That was partly because they didn\'t know how bad things were on the communist side of the world, but it was also partly because things were bad in the West.

Environmentally friendly business practices have long been mainstream, particularly when they create a brand advantage, as with organic foods.

Plutocrats were the chief beneficiaries of so-called neoliberalism and the suite of political changes it brought beginning in the late 1970s - deregulation, weaker protection for unions, the shareholder value movement, and the subsequent inflation of executive compensation.

If you believe in democracy, the overreach of leaders is a good reminder that vigorous public debate and time-consuming due process are not only more fair and more just, but that over the long term they usually produce better government, too.

I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium.

Our battle over the size of the state overlooks a problem that is just as important and that may be easier to muster the collective will to resolve: how effective government is, regardless of its scale.

One of the great, and largely forgotten, triumphs of American society and government has been how smoothly U.S. farmers and their communities negotiated the creative destruction of the early 20th century and emerged triumphant when it was over.

One consequence of Russia\'s klepto-capitalist model is the growing appeal of government jobs, with their lucrative opportunities for payoffs.

Especially among journalists, politics is not a pursuit that\'s held in high esteem. We tend to be cynical about it - but I actually believe in democracy.

This notion that borders wouldn\'t matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.

If the Tea Party gets its way, there will be less government - which is great for the elites. They don\'t need the government.