Quotes from Michael Lewis

The pattern continued right through the pandemic: the Trump administration would claim with fanfare that supplies were on their way to the states and leave it to the career civil servants whose job was to interact with state officials to reap the humiliation when those supplies failed to arrive. It would happen again with ventilators, with the drug Remdesivir, and, finally, with vaccines

This gorgeous financial myopia was common in the Valley, and one of the chief sources of its success.

His attitude to the clutter of daily life was of a piece with his strategy for dealing with social demands. Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away, he said. Everything that didn't seem to Amos obviously important he chucked, and thus what he saved acquired the interest of objects that have survived a pitiless culling.

The technologist's tendency to commit all his resources to new technology

Companies that manufactured aspirin petitioned the White House. "The White House called and told us to cease and desist," recalled Foege. "Do a new study." The aspirin makers had been able to force the CDC to scrap its findings and slow down science. Foege had resigned after that. "The fact that they would risk the lives of children—it just bothered me so much," he said.

fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. "Program management" is not just program management. "Program management" is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk.

attention deficit disorder in his own son. "I had worked in an ADHD clinic during my residency, and had strong feelings that this was overdiagnosed," he said. "That it was a 'savior' diagnosis for too many kids whose parents wanted a medical reason to drug their children, or to explain their kids' bad behavior.

Goldman Sachs did not leave the house before it began to burn; it was merely the first to dash through the exit—and then it closed the door behind it.

the White House converted the position of CDC director from career civil servant to presidential appointee. Since the agency's inception back in 1946, no one had paid much attention to the party politics of the CDC director. ("No one ever asked me," said Foege.) Henceforth the CDC director would not bubble up from inside the CDC, lifted by the approval of his peers, but would be plucked from the supporters of whichever politician happened to occupy the White House.

He showed them a survey that Lisa Koonin commissioned, of parents with children who used it: just one in seven, or 2.8 million, said they'd have trouble feeding their children if schools could not. If schools were closed, Carter concluded, the problem was not 30 million kids but fewer than 3 million; they could be fed with supplemental food stamps.

He didn't worry about how screwed-up the market for some security became because he knew that eventually it would be disciplined by logic: Businesses either thrived or failed. Loans either were paid off or were defaulted upon.

No one knew why some people were superspreaders:

He'd been born in Poland and moved to the United States as a child. He had memories of Poland as a communist regime, and of the total breakdown of the government's ability to be useful to its citizens. What he saw in the local U.S. public-health offices remined him of public services in Poland, but before the collapse of communism.

And [Thaler] noticed that when he had his fellow economists to dinner, they filled up on cashews, which meant they had less appetite for the meal. More to the point, he noticed that they tended to be relieved when he removed the cashew nuts, so they didn't ruin their dinners. The idea that it could make you better off to reduce your choices—that idea was alien to economics.

There is a magic moment, during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is about to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer [read bond trader] will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on.

Steal from those beneath you; attack those above you.

Textbooks in economics, which explain the economic purpose of money (a unit of account, a store of value, and a means of exchange), usually neglect to mention the chief role of money in America: a source of entertainment.

The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population.

How many people can pick up a book and find an instruction manual for their life?

Burry did not think investing could be reduced to a formula or learned from any one role model. The more he studied Buffett, the less he thought Buffett could be copied; indeed, the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual. "If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are," Burry said. "At one point I recognized

Stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them...what people remember about the past, [Kahneman and Tversky] suggested, is likely to warp their judgement of the future. We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.

But not for him. "This is the crux of science," he'd say with enthusiasm. "All science is modeling. In all science you are abstracting from nature. The question is: is it a useful abstraction." Useful, to Bob Glass, meant: Does it help solve a problem?

When asked the key to his success, he said, "In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

By May 2007, however, there was a growing dispute between Howie Hubler and Morgan Stanley. Amazingly, it had nothing to do with the wisdom of owning $16 billion in complex securities whose value ultimately turned on the ability of a Las Vegas stripper with five investment properties, or a Mexican strawberry picker with a single $750,000 home, to make rapidly rising interest payments.