Quotes from Michael Lewis

a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.

Here was one of the predictions that economists made that Edwards thought psychologists might test: Are actual human beings transitive? If at any given moment they preferred coffee to tea and tea to hot chocolate, did they prefer coffee to hot chocolate? A few people had recently looked into the matter, Edwards noted, among them a mathematician named Kenneth May. Writing in a leading economics journal, Econometrica

In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln had decided it was time to make U.S. agriculture more efficient: each person not needed on the farm was another person freed up to do something else. That's why the Department of Agriculture was created in the first place, as a vast science lab.

The markets in the long run are no doubt driven by fundamental economic laws—if the United States runs a persistent trade deficit, the dollar will eventually plummet—but in the short run money flows less rationally. Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.

You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can't outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not.

The change in the kind of person who got rich enough to buy a professional sports franchise also had helped. "The owners often made their money from disrupting fields where most of the conventional wisdom is bullshit," said Morey. These people tended to be keenly aware of the value of even slight informational advantages, and open to the idea of using data to gain those advantages.

Mental masturbation is actually an important concept. It's when you talk in circles for an hour and reach no decision.

In 1872, the average American farmer fed roughly four other people; now the average farmer feeds about 155 other people.

It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what's in them must be invented." What

Maybe the mind's best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.

downside to experience. "Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence," he said. The line wasn't his, but he liked it.

Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice. "No matter what the regulators did, some other intermediary found a way to react, so there would be another form of front-running

I hated discussing ideas with investors, he said, because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process. Once you became an idea's defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it.

to find the phenomenon and then explain it in a way that applies to other situations

One of these people—a Canadian, of all things—stands at the picture's center, organizing the many smaller pictures into a coherent whole. His willingness to throw open a window on the American financial world, and to show people what it has become, still takes my breath away.

Statistics wasn't just boring numbers; it contained ideas that allowed you to glimpse deep truths about human life. "Because

He wasn't cruel. He wasn't even rude, at least not intentionally. He simply evoked extreme feelings in others.

He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, "All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.

a penniless, jobless old college friend who had been offered several loans from banks to buy a house he couldn't afford. That's

One piece of bad luck was rapid technical change, which was a weapon that oddball upstarts could use against the enormous gray corporations.

The Valley was a little experiment of capitalism with too much capital.

And if . . . well, it wasn't long before she'd have an epidemic on her hands. "I knew I had to stay ahead of it," said Charity. "Because ninety percent of the battle is in the first few days. But in the beginning it's always quiet, and you are quietly making decisions, and you're a nut job.

He shouted into the phone, "That is fuckin' awesome. I mean fuckin' awesome. I fuckin' mean fucking awesome. You are one Big Swinging Dick, and don't ever let anybody tell you different." It brought tears to my eyes to hear it, to be called a Big Swinging Dick by the man who, years ago, had given birth to the distinction and in my mind had the greatest right to confer it upon me.

Fighting wildfires is the most visible thing the USDA does. It's the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most.