It's one of the tragedies of the modern university that it offers little space to generalists.
Children are born as emphatic and compassionate beings - so you don't have to teach them generosity, it's in their nature to be friendly.
One of my rules for life is: 'When in doubt, assume the best,' because in the end, most people are pretty decent.
A lot of journalists help us to better understand the world by zooming out and sometimes zooming in on a really important case but sort of helping us to get a grasp of what are the structural forces that govern our lives and our societies and that is incredibly important.
One of the basic lessons of history is that things can be different.
News reports following a natural disaster are almost always dominated by stories of looting and violence, but in many cases such stories turn out to be unfounded speculations based on rumour.
Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place.
Contact is the best medicine against hate, racism and prejudice. It's something that we should be very wary of, the more segregation we have, the more of a problem that's going to be.
While it won't solve all the world's ills - and ideas such as a rent cap and more social housing are necessary in places where housing is scarce - a basic income would work like venture capital for the people.
In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines - anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists - have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.
We like to think that people have to work for their money.
Well, the news is mostly about things that go wrong, right? It's about sensationalist incidents that happened today, instead of things that happen every day. So if you watch and follow a lot of the news, at the end of the day, you know exactly how the world is not working.
I always eat bread and almost always peanut butter and apple syrup, sometimes cheese. I hardly ever ate out as a child. When I did it more as a student, it felt strange to be served.
My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That's hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.
A Dutchman can't easily get away from cheese. I was dropped into a cauldron of cheese when I was young.
During the Enlightenment, there were brilliant thinkers who realized that, if you assume most people are naturally selfish and you construct the market around that, sometimes it can actually work for the common good. I just think that in many cases, it went too far.
It matters so much that from a very early age we encounter different kinds of different people, because that's what real life should be about as well.
Since 1963, the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center has conducted nearly 700 field studies on floods and earthquakes, and on-site research reveals the same results every time: the vast majority of people stay calm and help each other.
Around the year 2000, countries such as France, the Netherlands and the US were already five times as wealthy as in 1930. Yet nowadays our biggest challenges are not leisure and boredom, but stress and uncertainty.
I first read 'Lord of the Flies' as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding's view of human nature.
