Quotes from Michael Lewis

People's emotional response to extremely long odds led them to reverse their usual taste for risk, and to become risk seeking when pursuing a long-shot gain and risk avoiding when faced with the extremely remote possibility of loss. (Which is why they bought both lottery tickets and insurance.)

The gist of all three was that the CDC, under Robert Redfield, had been disgraced. It had let itself be used by the Trump administration to lead the United States in a direction opposite to the direction the United States had once led the world.

Knowledge is literally prediction," said Morey. "Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome.

Charles Kindleberger's 1978 classic, Manias, Panics, and Crashes.

stinginess was contagious and so was generosity, and since behaving generously made you happier than behaving stingily, you should avoid stingy people and spend your time only with generous ones.

It was our ability to refocus India from herd immunity to attacking the virus that allowed smallpox eradication to succeed.")

Brad's desk to the BATS exchange in Weehawken, was about 2 milliseconds, and the slowest, from Brad's desk to Carteret, was around 4 milliseconds. In practice, the times could vary much more than that, depending on network traffic, static, and glitches in the pieces of equipment between any two points. It took 100 milliseconds to blink your eyes; it was hard to believe that a fraction of the blink of an eye could have such vast market consequences.

When he began to grasp, along with the rest of the world, what big American firms had done—rigged credit ratings to make bad loans seem like good loans, created subprime bonds designed to fail, sold them to their customers and then bet against them, and so on—his mind hit some kind of wall. For

If you had asked Ali, before he went to New Orleans, what he thought of people who didn't help themselves, he would have said, "My parents had to start all over again. What's the big deal? Just suck it up." The sight of little kids post-Katrina jolted him. "It kind of blew my mind—if you are in kindergarten you should at least get a fair shot. It was just eye-opening: to see how much your geography could determine the opportunities available to you.

the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked "Rural Development." That's not what has happened.

that have become more productive. In 1950, the average cow yielded 5,300 pounds of milk. In 2016, the average cow yielded 23,000 pounds of milk. A Wisconsin Holstein recently yielded nearly 75,000 pounds of milk in a year, which amounts to roughly 24 gallons a day. Her name is Gigi. You can thank her later.

There's a real idealism that you have to indulge to think that people in New Orleans were now going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There were no bootstraps.

Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.

I have found that there is an order of magnitude difference between bearing the ultimate responsibility for decision-making and being either an advisor or student of the process," he wrote. "It's one thing to experience an orgasm or an arrow between your ribs and it's another thing to read about it.

problem wasn't as simple as a bad cop. Maybe it was the emotional state in which the cop had found himself.

If the player had broken his neck the night before the NBA draft, for instance, it would be nice to know. But if you had asked Daryl Morey in 2006 to choose between his model and a roomful of basketball scouts, he'd have taken his model.

I ask them if it ever troubled them to devote their lives, and expensive educations, to a trivial game. They look at me as if I've lost my mind, and Paul actually laughed. "Oh, you mean as opposed to working in some deeply meaningful job on Wall Street?" he said.

The way to stop the captain from landing the plane in the wrong airport, Amos insisted, was to train others in the cockpit to question his judgment.

The regulation side of things is, as a rule, less vulnerable to the short-term idiocy of a new administration than the money side of things.

I couldn't design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system

Cajun coach for a good thirty minutes, as he listened to the other coaches, only in Coach O's case there was a twist: Michael couldn't understand

One intervention was not like the others, however: when you closed schools and put social distance between kids, the flu-like disease fell off a cliff. (The model defined "social distance" not as zero contact but as a 60 percent reduction in kids' social interaction.) "I said, 'Holy shit!' " said Carter. "Nothing big happens until you close the schools.

No one cares about data when everything is going well," said Josh Wills, the former chief data engineer at Slack, who agreed to help. "People only care about data when the shit hits the fan. 'Oh my God, what's going on??? We need data!

At Salomon Brothers he traded bonds while being hollered at by six salesmen, eating a morning cheeseburger, and watching Ranieri hold a Bic lighter under the balls of a fellow trader.