Quotes from Michael Lewis

Cuando no tenemos evidencia concreta, utilizamos correctamente las probabilidades básicas; cuando disponemos de evidencia concreta pero inútil, no se tienen en cuenta las probabilidades básicas

The idiot is bound by his pride," he says. "It always has to be his way.

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world's most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something more like a private viewing of a stolen work of art.

Instead of focusing on profits, trading managers focused on revenues.

At this point she had a long list of the ways the CDC, with the help of their former employee and her current boss, had made it more difficult for her to do her job. Now they were trying to add to it, by interfering with the best chance California had to track the virus and limit its damage.

By accident, some traders had stumbled across a route controlled by Verizon that took 14.65 milliseconds. "The Gold Route," the traders called it, because on the occasions you happened to find yourself on it you were the first to exploit the discrepancies between prices in Chicago and prices in New York.

They stopped thinking like social justice warriors and became parents. Of course if there was a real risk of disease killing their children they'd keep their kids home from school!

Standing between the cure and the patient, in this case, was a U.S. medical-industrial complex that lurched between lethargy and avarice.

American bond traders may have sunk their firms by turning a blind eye to the risks in the subprime bond market, but they made a fortune for themselves in the bargain, and have for the most part never been called to account.

you get when you can't think of a word that feels as if it's right on the tip of your tongue. For most people the relief they experience upon finding it is almost physical. They sink back in their

But by the end of 2016, America's children were eating better than they had been in 2008. "Ninety-eight percent of the schools were meeting the new standards," says Concannon, "and to those that weren't, that had some problem, we'd say," We'll work with you!

The eight-volume Encyclopedia of Psychology will answer just about any question you might have about psychology, clearly and directly. The nine-volume (and counting) A History of Psychology in Autobiography will answer just about any question you might have about psychologists, though less directly.

the hospital where he was born must have preserved some record of the event, but Michael didn't

What she cared about, suddenly, was this rogue group of patriots who were working behind the scenes to save the country.

If you're not interested in the thing, and if you're just in it for the money, then you're not really going to have a sense of achievement.

The Great Influenza, a book by the historian John Barry about the 1918 flu pandemic.

It was troubling to consider, he began, "an organism equipped with an affective and hormonal system not much different from that of the jungle rat being given the ability to destroy every living thing by pushing a few buttons." Given

Rivals accused Whitney of being overrated; bloggers accused her of being lucky. What she was, mainly, was right.

American society had no ability to deal with what she felt was coming. "The United States doesn't really have a public-health system," she said. "It has five thousand dots, and each one of those dots serves at the will of an elected official.

Of the roughly $9 billion spent each year by the Commerce Department, $5 billion goes to NOAA, and the bulk of that money is spent, one way or another, on figuring out the weather. Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.

No trader or investor wanted to poke around suburbs to find out whether the homeowner to whom he had just lent money was creditworthy. For the home mortgage to become a bond it had to be depersonalised. At

Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.

What could go wrong?

There was no system of public health in the United States, just a patchwork of state and local health officers, beholden to a greater or lesser degree to local elected officials. Three thousand five hundred separate entities that had been starved of resources for the past forty years.