“China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice it is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do anything it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it. In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city state, they followed this line of thinking even further, and pegged ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, ministers get a raise, as if that is what their job is all about”

Israeli historian and popular science writer

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian, military historian, public intellectual, and popular science writer. He is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is known for his widely read books on human history and the future. His first bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, grew out of lectures he gave to an undergraduate world history class. He later published Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. His work often examines free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, suffering, and the place of storytelling in human evolution.