Quotes from Michael Lewis

A trader who expects to be given a million-dollar bonus, and who further expects everyone else on his trading desk to be given million-dollar bonuses, will not maintain the same reference point if he learns that everyone else just received two million dollars. If he is then paid a million dollars, he is back in the domain of losses.

people had the ability to hold in their short-term memory seven items, more or less.

They were "risk averse." But what was this thing that everyone had been calling "risk aversion?" It amounted to a fee that people paid, willingly, to avoid regret: a regret premium.

There was a relentlessness in the way Danny's mind moved from insight to application. Psychologists, especially the ones who became university professors, weren't exactly known for being useful. The demands of being an Israeli had forced Danny to find a talent in himself he might otherwise never have spotted.

At other places management says, 'Well, gee, fellas, do we really want to bet the ranch on this deal?' Lewie was not only willing to bet the ranch. He was willing to hire people and let them bet the ranch, too. His attitude was: 'Sure, what the fuck, it's only a ranch.

The math of the matter changed with the situation, but, broadly speaking, an attempted steal had to succeed about 70 percent of the time before it contributed positively to run totals.

There was a joke that captured the antiseptic spirit of behaviorism that Skinner himself liked to tell: A couple makes love. Afterward, one of them turns to the other and says, "It was good for you. How was it for me?

His father had turned away from an early career in medicine, Amos explained to friends, because "he thought animals had more real pain than people and complained a lot less." Yosef Tversky was a serious man.

it became clear that Trump's approach to government management was only a part of the story, and maybe not even the bigger part. As one of my characters put it, "Trump was a comorbidity.

The first SARS outbreak had ended because those infected had been isolated quickly and prevented from infecting others. Those capable of infecting others were easy to identify because they were so obviously ill. There were few, if any, asymptomatic spreaders. The virus had not vanished, however. "It's still out there," said Joe. "It didn't come from outer space. There's a very meaningful probability that it can arise again.

How a switch made by Cisco compared to a switch made by Juniper.

The aisle was narrower than a normal bus; paramedics knew not to bring a normal-sized stretcher onto a school bus, he later learned, because it wouldn't fit down the aisle. "I couldn't design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system," he said after his visit.

Here is the frightening aspect of the global supply chain," said Joe. "When there is a surge in demand, inventory goes to zero. Just-in-time manufacturing. Great concept! Horrible in a pandemic.

conversation really matters. Converse means exchange with. It does not mean transmit at. That's how you get new thinking.

By his fourth pro season Taylor was not just feeding

from senior management that my customer would not get scalped, then everyone could win. Salomon would make a lot of money. My customer would make a little money (which, for a customer, was grand). And I would be a hero. If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar

Much is made of a kind heart," he said. "I'm more of a feed-yourself-or-die kind of guy.

The new companies often put the old ones out of business; the young were forever eating the old. The whole of the Valley was a speeded-up Oedipal drama. In this drama technology played a very clear role. It was the murder weapon.

In people's perceptions of money, as surely as in their perception of light and sound and the weather and everything else under the sun, what mattered was not the absolute levels but changes. People making choices, especially choices between gambles for small sums of money, made them in terms of gains and losses; they weren't thinking about absolute levels.

The central question posed by Gestalt psychologists was the question the behaviorists had elected to ignore: How does the brain create meaning? How does it turn the fragments collected by the senses into a coherent picture of reality?

You have to stay ahead of the public road map." The minute investors understood what you were doing, they held you in lower estimation.

This is the secret of success for anywhere in the world, not just the monastery," he says, and then goes on to describe pretty much word for word the first rule of improvisational comedy, or for that matter any successful collaborative enterprise. Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. "Yes . . . and" rather than "No . . . but.

The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on.

In the end, he decided that the Rockets needed to reduce to data, and subject to analysis, a lot of stuff that had never before been seriously analyzed: physical traits. They needed to know not just how high a player jumped but how quickly he left the earth—how fast his muscles took him into the air. They needed to measure not just the speed of the player but the quickness of his first two steps. That is, they needed to be even more geeky than they already were.