Quotes About Change

Undressing him reminds me of trying to change a sleepy, uncooperative four-year-old into his pajamas.-Dom

Once you've ridden the roller coaster, the Ferris wheel's kinda restricting.

That I don't feel upset by us really being over almost trivializes how special and intense our relationship once was.

When did you stop caring for me? Certainly not before Thanksgiving. You certainly wouldn't accept a blow job from someone if you were thinking about breaking up with her.

The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.

So few of our days contain actions that are irrevocable. Our lives are designed not to allow for anything irrevocable. The school part of our lives continues to be the school part for eighteen years, the work parts stay the work parts, and if we're lucky nothing disarranges them; the small inconsistencies get buried under talk, explanations, rescheduling. If everything couldn't continue as planned, no real plans could be made.

The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions.

Economic growth and technological change are accompanied by what the great economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction.

There could be some economic growth without innovation, relying on existing technology, but it was growth without creative destruction. And it did not last.

When the barons and local elites recognize that political power will be increasingly more centralized and that this process is hard to stop, they will make demands to have a say in how this centralized power is used.

Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites.

los líderes de los países pobres son ignorantes. La consecuencia es que las políticas no se adoptan ni se implantan, o se implantan solamente de nombre.

The people who suffer from the extractive economic institutions cannot hope for absolutist rulers to voluntarily change political institutions and redistribute power in society. The only way to change these political institutions is to force the elite to create more pluralistic institutions.

when a critical juncture arrives, these small differences that have emerged as a result of institutional drift may be the small differences that matter in leading otherwise quite similar societies to diverge radically.

Different patterns of institutions today are deeply rooted in the past because once society gets organized in a particular way, this tends to persist.

Technological change is only one of the engines of prosperity, but it is perhaps the most critical one.

The so-called ancien régime prided itself on its continuity and stability. Entry by entrepreneurs and talented individuals into new occupations would create instability and was not tolerated. If

El temor a la destrucción creativa es la razón principal por la que no hubo un aumento sostenido del nivel de vida entre la revolución neolítica y la revolución industrial

Because elites dominating extractive institutions fear creative destruction, they will resist it, and any growth that germinates under extractive institutions will be ultimately short lived.

But in many other cases, just the opposite takes place, and the process of political centralization also ushers in an era of greater absolutism.

revolution that overthrew Mubarak will lead to a new set of institutions capable of bringing prosperity

history is not destiny.

Why does the path of institutional change differ across societies? The answer to this question lies in institutional drift. In the same way that the genes of two isolated populations of organisms will drift apart slowly because of random mutations in the so-called process of evolutionary or genetic drift, two otherwise similar societies will also drift apart institutionally—albeit, again, slowly.

Fear of creative destruction is often at the root of the opposition to inclusive economic and political institutions.