Quotes from Michael Lewis

I found that if schools are closed AND preschoolers, children and teens are restricted to the home epidemics that would have infected 65% of the population COULD BE REDUCED BY NEARLY 80%," she wrote. "If adults also restrict their contacts within non-essential work environments epidemics from such highly infective strains can be ENTIRELY THWARTED!

We kept saying, 'These banks are out of business.' But the government kept saving the banks," he said. "And right in the midst of this Iceland went broke.

They really should just change the name," she said. "It shouldn't be the Centers for Disease Control. It should be the Centers for Disease Observation and Reporting. That's what they do well.

They collected great heaps of data: choices people had actually made. "Always keep one hand firmly on data," Amos liked to say.

Kansas, Concannon had explained to an executive who oversaw the state's food-stamp program how he had made it easier for people in Oregon who were going hungry to access their program. "He said," Jeez, if we did that we'd have more people coming in the door.' And I said," Yeah, but isn't that the idea?

Forever and forever, farewell, John Milholland / If we do meet again, why, we shall smile / If not, why then, this parting was well made": lines spoken by Brutus to Cassius in act 5, scene 1, of Julius Caesar. He aced the test.

even in success Markovich witnessed the dysfunction of American government.

orator Isocrates: "Democracy destroys itself

the insights at the heart of her project had become the official policy of the United States government, and were spreading rapidly from the CDC to the rest of the world.

There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error.

It went that way with much of what they needed to buy: some companies sought to exploit the moment; others sought to help. "We quickly figured out that some companies actually have a moral compass and some of them don't," said Joe.

Fair enough, Gutfreund had once been a trader, but that was as relevant as an old woman's claim that she was once quite a dish.

doctors don't think probabilities apply to their patients

asked myself, Why didn't these epidemiologists figure it out? They didn't figure it out because they didn't have tools that were focused on the problem. They had tools to understand the movement of infectious disease without the purpose of trying to stop it.

Expected utility theory wasn't exactly wrong. It simply did not understand itself, to the point where it could not defend itself against seeming contradictions. The theory's failure to explain people's decisions, Danny and Amos wrote, "merely demonstrates what should perhaps be obvious, that non-monetary consequences of decisions cannot be neglected, as they all too often are, in applications of utility theory.

you become very much independent of material property and learn to appreciate very simple pleasures in life such as the sunlight and morning breeze.

Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence

If perception had the power to overwhelm reality in such a simple case, how much power might it have in a more complicated one?

a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

The way I solve a hard problem is not to start with the conventional wisdom, but to start over.

perhaps undervalued, contributions to the whole. Fifteen percent of the country lives in towns of fewer than 10,000

The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

Allan confined himself to one investment decision: whether to buy shares in a new company when it went public.

see. "Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don't even realize it is happening," he said. A scout would settle on an opinion about a player and then arrange the evidence to support that opinion. "The