Nobel Laureate Thomas Sargent: True collaboration needs mutual understanding

By Yinong Li, SFC, 21st Century Business Herald

At the CIIE Hongqiao Forum’s Parallel Session on Pudong and the World: Forging a Path to Openness, Shaping a New Industrial Landscape, Nobel laureate Thomas J. Sargent highlighted how institutions shape expectations and collective behavior.

He noted that openness and security complement each other, and that meaningful cooperation rests on cultural intelligence—understanding others’ perspectives, constraints, and ways of organizing the world. Drawing on his own open-source research practices, Sargent emphasized that in a globally connected economy, the most valuable exchanges extend beyond goods and services to the sharing and refinement of ideas.