Quotes from Gillian Tett

the word "silo" does not just refer to a physical structure or organization (such as a department). It can also be a state of mind. Silos exist in structures. But they exist in our minds and social groups too. Silos breed tribalism. But they can also go hand in hand with tunnel vision.

silos are fundamentally a cultural phenomenon. They arise because social groups and organizations have particular conventions about how to classify the world.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Every established order tends to make its own entirely arbitrary system seem entirely natural." —Pierre Bourdieu1

To him, bankers were neither noble or Masters of the Universe. They were just businesspeople doing a job, pushing money around the economy as efficiently and effectively as they could.

the key point is this: with or without a formal training in anthropology, we all do need to think about the cultural patterns and classification systems that we use. If we do, we can master our silos. If we do not, they will master us.

are culture-vultures; but not in the way this phrase is usually used," as Stephen Hugh-Jones, a British anthropologist, explains. "For anthropologists 'culture' is not a matter of refinement of tastes or the intellectual side of civilization; it is the commonly-held ideas, beliefs and practices of any society of any kind.

he analyzed how a mundane action, such as deciding to order bouillabaisse in a restaurant (or not) creates social labels and markers that sort people into different groups.

The paradox of the modern age, I realized, is that we live in a world that is closely integrated in some ways, but fragmented in others. Shocks are increasingly contagious. But we continue to behave and think in tiny silos.

If you could really insure banks and other lenders against default risk, that might well unleash a great wave of capital into the economy.

As with all derivatives, these tools were to offer a way of controlling risk, but they could also amplify it.

If defaults on mortgages were uncorrelated, then the BISTRO structure should be safe for mortgage risk, but if they were highly correlated, it might be catastrophically dangerous. Nobody could know. Duhon

Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival." —René Dubos

wherever you sit, in whatever blend of familiar and strange, it always pays to stop and ask yourself a simple question that the bankers on the Riviera were not asking: If I was to arrive in this culture, as a total stranger, or as a Martian or child, what might I see?

a compartmentalized mental, cultural, and spatial framework that appeared to be widespread.

people typically overemphasize risks that arrive from outside the group and underestimate the ones that are inside the group. Throughout history pandemics have been associated with xenophobia, even if people are complacent about domestic infection risks.

During the next eight years Bell lived in an Aboriginal community of about six hundred people near Alice Springs.I "I dropped out of school, stopped wearing shoes, and went hunting with people every chance I got," she said. She learned to extract water from desert frogs and snacked on "witchetty grubs," a type of Australian caterpillar that lives among tree roots. "I was very fortunate. I had the most blessed childhood."2

When people such as Malinowski went to the Trobriand Islands, they were coming from a society that was more powerful than the one they were studying. In the City of London, financiers were far more powerful than journalists or anthropologists; the challenge was how to "study up.

It was surprisingly hard for insiders to draw this "map" of all the financial flows that shaped the City. They could see pieces of this picture. There was excellent data about equity listings, say. But none of the people working in private sector banks or government institutions could offer an easy-to-follow idiot's guide to show how all these flows interacted.

But it was hard to find these: few of the human financiers involved in debt, derivatives, or securitization world wanted to be quoted or photographed, and it was almost impossible to see the human borrowers at the end of the complex financial chains.

patterns. This sense of hierarchy and conformity was particularly strong during the militarist period of the 1930s. However, after Japan lost the war in 1945, the country became

In Silicon Valley it is assumed that information on slick professional websites is more trustworthy than that from amateur sites, because that is how techies think. But conspiracy theorists only trusted scruffy sites, since they presumed that the hated elites created the "smart" sites. This insight matters enormously if you want to debunk conspiracies.

Burton and his ilk also had a distinctive philosophy: they believed that science showed that Europeans and Americans were biologically, mentally, and socially superior to others. "The savage is morally and mentally an unfit instrument for the spread of civilization except when, like the higher mammalia, he is reduced to a state of slavery," wrote August Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers,

None of the women in the women were eating in the daytime, unless they were pregnant or working, because they were observing the Muslim fast.