Quotes from Michael Lewis

By 1976, purely for marketing purposes, they changed their title to "Prospect Theory." "The idea was to give the theory a completely distinct name that would have no associations whatsoever," said Danny. "When you say 'prospect theory,' no one knows what you're talking about. We thought: Who knows? It may turn out to be influential. And if it is we don't want it to be confused with anything else.

He now sat on a billion dollars of Netscape shares and could do whatever the hell he pleased with them. And what pleased him was to put it at great risk.

you could rent a million-dollar home for less than $833 a month.

including those circumstances where social distancing measures, limitations on gatherings or quarantine authority may be an appropriate public health intervention.

Every manager of a Wall Street tech group likes to have people believe that his guys are geniuses. Russians, whatever. His whole persona among his peers is that what he and his team do can't be replicated. When people find out that ninety-five percent of their code is open source, it kills that perception.

They sprinkled their money around a lot of different companies and counted on the law of averages to take care of the rest. Clark took a different approach.

In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks.

The VCs could tolerate companies' going bust—they had so many of them—but they could not tolerate missing out on the new new thing.

I'm seeing comments from people asking why WHO and CDC seem to be downplaying this," wrote Carter. "I'm certainly no public health expert . . . but no matter how I look at this, it looks bad." On January

Progress does not march forward like an army on parade; it crawls on its belly like a guerrilla.

You saw someone who reminded you of you, and then you looked for the reasons why you liked him. The

It was also possible to back out from the box scores the pace at which various college teams played—how often they went up and down the court. Adjusting a college player's stats for his team's pace of play was telling. Points and rebounds meant one thing when the team took 150 shots a game and something different when it took just 75. Just adjusting for pace gave you a clearer picture of what any given player had accomplished than the conventional view did.

A lot of what people did and said when they predicted things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, It's impossible to know for sure.

The deeper he got into his medical career, the more Burry felt constrained by his problems with other people in the flesh. He briefly tried to hide in pathology, where the people had the decency to be dead, but that didn't work. ("Dead people, dead parts. More dead people, more dead parts. I thought, I want something more cerebral.") He'd

If I'm a Trump person I'm going to assume the people in charge of the nuclear weapons are sufficiently alive to the risks around them that they don't need Rick Perry's help. After all, the only thing Trump had to say publicly about Rick Perry during the campaign was that he "should be forced to take an IQ test" and that "he put glasses on so people think he's smart.

The training program wasn't a survival course, but sometimes a person came through who put the horrors of 41 into perspective.

It's supply and demand," he said. "My sister teaches kids with learning disabilities. She enjoys her work as much as I do, but earns much less. If nobody else wanted to teach, she'd make more money." Say what you will about the analysis.

How important could the sound it made be, if no one was able to hear it?

if a department allowed someone to leave, it was for the good reason that it wanted to get rid of him; when you took people from other departments, you got only the ones you didn't want.

The big banks and the exchanges have a clear responsibility to protect investors—to handle investor stock market orders in the best possible way, and to create a fair marketplace. They've been paid to compromise investors' interests, while pretending to guard those interests. I was surprised more people weren't angry with them.

Danny the whole idea of proving that people weren't rational felt a bit like proving that people didn't have fur. Obviously people were not rational, in any meaningful sense of that term.

I recall that one of the first investment bankers I met taught me a poem. God gave you eyes, plagiarize. A

His first mistake, he decided, was to have paid insufficient attention to Joey Dorsey's age. "He was insanely old," says Morey. "He was twenty-four years old when we drafted him." Dorsey's college career was impressive because he was so much older than the people he played against.

That is, various social interventions would reduce infections, hospitalizations, and deaths to a tenth of what they otherwise would have been.