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.

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

When you think of technological revolution, you probably think of geeks in cool coastal spaces like the Google campus, or perhaps of math wizards on Wall Street. But one source of rural prosperity is the adoption of radical new technologies - and a consequent surge in productivity.

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.

Twitter-lutionaries are good at toppling regimes, but in the Mideast and North Africa, they're losing out to the Islamists, who've built protest movements the old-fashioned way. And in Moscow, the Mink revolutionaries, who are united by Live-Journal but not much else, were easy for Putin to outmaneuver.

Social media now make it easier to organize protest movements, even - or perhaps especially - in authoritarian regimes.

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

Executive pay has skyrocketed for many reasons - including the prevalence of overly cozy boards and changing cultural norms about pay - but increasing scale, competition, and innovation have all played major roles.

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.

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.

Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth.

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.

In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult.

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.

In America, we have equated personal business success with public virtue.

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

If you believe in democracy, than you can't trash it by being cynical about the people who do democracy: the politicians.

Plutocrats worldwide have readily understood the advantages of evading the burdens of the nation-state.

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.

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.

Sometimes who is going to be taking care of all of my kids on any given day is more complicated than any trade agreement.

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

When I was a kid in junior high, I had an assignment to discuss how to rescue poor people in India. I remember my teacher at the time considered it an impossible problem. Now, we're not talking that way anymore. We're sure not talking about that for China. They're rescuing themselves thanks to globalization.