 The most important issue facing the globe today is the whole question of urbanization. We are urbanizing at a rate of one and a half million people a week. This tsunami of problems that have come to the fore from global warming, the environment, to financial markets, to questions of risk, pollution, disease, crime, all of these seem to be huge problems are all generated by urbanization. If you start to think you can solve the world's problems by only focusing on financial markets or global warming, you're doomed. Each one of them is a complex adaptive system and they're all interrelated and we need to think in systemic terms, meaning to recognize that in some extraordinary way health, in AIDS cases, flu, etc., is some curious way tied to the markets, which is in some curious way tied to the length of all the roads that we have in our cities. All of these things are interconnected and we need to start really formulating a global kind of initiative. Every city looks unique and every city feels unique, yet when you look at data it's predictable. There's a potential science of cities. Amazingly, it follows very simple mathematical rules. You tell me the size of a city in the United States, for example, I will tell you how many AIDS cases it should have, how many police, how many crimes are being committed, within 85% accuracy, no matter what the metric is, what the quantities you look at is the same kind of rule, but even more amazing is the same rule across the globe. In thinking more systemically and using this kind of knowledge and formulating this kind of quantitative scientific framework, maybe we can help mitigate against the horrors of unintended consequences and deal with some of these questions. We need to develop not just an economic view of this, but something based in science. So adding to that all of the extraordinary human values that we believe in and make that also part of the equation.