Quotes About Resources

Resources are not infinite: you cannot solve tomorrow's problem if you aren't willing to abandon today's dud.

The economic approach is both broader and simpler than that. It relies on data, rather than hunch or ideology, to understand how the world works, to learn how incentives succeed (or fail), how resources get allocated, and what sort of obstacles prevent people from getting those resources, whether they are concrete (like food and transportation) or more aspirational (like education and love).

tragedy of the commons

What if, for instance, every Briton were also entitled to a free, unlimited, lifetime supply of transportation? That is, what if everyone were allowed to go down to the car dealership whenever they wanted and pick out any new model, free of charge, and drive it home?

Just how are the black schools bad? Not, interestingly, in the ways that schools are traditionally measured. In terms of class size, teachers' education, and computer-to-student ratio, the schools attended by blacks and whites are similar. But the typical black student's school has a far higher rate of troublesome indicators, such as gang problems, nonstudents loitering in front of the school, and lack of PTA funding. These schools

Here is the broader point: whatever problem you're trying to solve, make sure you're not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it's incredibly important to properly define the problem—or, better yet, redefine the problem.

The chief merit of the price system is that it makes effective use of information that is not available to any single decision maker. When the price system is overridden, information is discarded. When information is discarded, resources are misallocated. When resources are misallocated, prosperity suffers. If you're trying to make people prosperous, relying on prices is your best strategy.

Any organization can conceivably accumulate dozens if not hundreds of concepts (ideas and opportunities). There are never enough resources to work on all these good ideas; instead they have to be evaluated, vetted, and culled. Most

The wetland created by the beaver, like the thriving platform created by the Twitter founders, invites variation because it is an open platform where resources are shared as much as they are protected.

In other words, a serious crisis of nonrenewable energy resources is likely to accelerate the urbanization trend, not derail it.

Nature's innovations, too, rely on spare parts. Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.

it's a fallacy to think that people "need resources" in the first place.17 They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want.

It's often said that the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well.

In addition to beating back hunger, the ability to grow more food from less land has been, on the whole, good for the planet.

If agricultural efficiency had remained the same over the past fifty years while the world grew the same amount of food, an area the size of the United States, Canada, and China combined would have had to be cleared and plowed.

Among the surprises in the statistics are that some things that sound exciting, like instant independence, natural resources, revolutionary Marxism (when it is effective), and electoral democracy (when it is not) can increase deaths from violence, and some things that sound boring, like effective law enforcement, openness to the world economy, UN peacekeepers, and Plumpy'nut, can decrease them.

The zero-sum nature of the medieval economy was reinforced by a Christian ideology that was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources.

El romántico movimiento verde no ve la captación humana de energía como una forma de resistir la entropía y promover la prosperidad humana, sino como un crimen atroz contra la naturaleza, que conducirá a una guerra de recursos, aire y agua contaminados y que comportará un cambio climático que acabará con la civilización.

In my travels all over the world, I have come to realize that what distinguishes one child from another is not ability, but access. Access to education, access to opportunity, access to love.

No matter what happened to you in your past, you are not your past, you are the resources and the capabilities you glean from it. And that is the basis for all change.

One thing the American defense establishment has traditionally understood very well is that countries don't win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost.

if your government isn't wasteful, you're spending too much time fighting government waste.

y el buen gobernante en América no es el que sabe cómo se gobierna el alemán o el francés, sino el que sabe con qué elementos está hecho su país

Wenn eine Gesellschaft nicht mit der Erschöpfung ihrer Ressourcen umgehen kann, drehen sich die wirklich interessanten Fragen um die Gesellschaft und nicht um die Ressource. Welche strukturellen, politischen, ideologischen oder wirtschaftlichen Faktoren in der Gesellschaft verhinderten eine angemessene Reaktion