Quotes from Michael Lewis

Irish people will tell you that, because of their sad history of dispossession, owning a home is not just a way to avoid paying rent but a mark of freedom. In their rush to freedom, the Irish built their own prisons. And their leaders helped them to do it.

West Virginia

A commercial banker wasn't any more a troublemaker than Dagwood Bumstead.

But it implied, as utility theory never had, that it was as easy to get people to take risks as it was to get them to avoid them. All you had to do was present them with a choice that involved a loss. In the more than two hundred years since Bernoulli started the discussion, intellectuals had regarded risk-seeking behavior as a curiosity. If risk seeking was woven into human nature, as Danny and Amos's theory implied that it was, why hadn't people noticed it before?

New Growth Theory argued, in abstruse mathematics, that wealth came from the human imagination. Wealth wasn't chiefly having more of old things; it was having entirely new things. 'Growth is just another word for change

What Milken was saying was that the entire American credit-rating system was flawed. It focused on the past when it should have focused on the future, and it was burdened by a phony sense of prudence.

Man's inability to see the power of regression to the mean leaves him blind to the nature of the world around him. We are exposed to a lifetime schedule in which we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.

The Decision to Seed Hurricanes," a paper coauthored by Stanford professor Ron Howard. Howard was one of the founders of a new field called decision analysis. Its idea was to force decision makers to assign probabilities to various outcomes: to make explicit the thinking that went into their decisions before they made them.

Honey is tight as a coiled spring, all steel and no magnolia.

El mero acto de la clasificación refuerza los estereotipos. Si queremos debilitar un estereotipo, eliminemos la clasificación.

to Clark's way of thinking, the big distinction wasn't between "work" and "play" but between "creating new technology for money" and "creating new technology for pleasure.

Why is it that people channel so many of their hang-ups about people who are poor or unsuccessful into the food-stamps program?" asks Concannon as we settle into our chairs, then answers his own question.

This was extreme. An NFL football field is a tightly strung economy. Everything on it comes at a price. Take

Chop house brokers are nomads. The chop house folds or is shut down by the SEC, and its employees move on in a teeming, peristaltic mass.

For people to accept the yoke, they must believe they have no choice.

The big takeaways seemed to be what everyone was just then figuring out: the virus was disproportionately attacking poor people of color unable to work from home; and lots of infectious people were walking around without a clue about their condition.

Cambiando el contexto en que se comparan dos cosas se ocultan ciertos rasgos y emergen otros a la superficie

They do the same thing. Two tight ends on Lawrence

Either way, Wolter was not entirely at ease in the new climate. Before Juliet the official slogan of the Royal Huisman Shipyard had been "If you can dream it, we can build it." Now a new sign hung in one of Wolter Huisman's offices: "Their Dream Is Our Nightmare." At

They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating

Trump's first budget eliminated ARPA-E altogether. It also eliminated the spectacularly successful $70 billion loan program. It cut funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of six thousand of their people. It eliminated all research on climate change. It halved the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster.

don't be an ape! Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be.

The simple reason Goldman wasn't making much of the big money now being made in the stock market was that the stock market had become a war of robots, and Goldman's robots were slow.

The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person's reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.