Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click ‘I agree’ but you don’t know what you’re agreeing to.
Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They’ll bankrupt you. Don’t ask a general for advice on war, and don’t ask a broker for advice on money.
Paul Krugman is a danger to society!
The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That’s the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
What we need to do is break the financial community’s grip on society.
When you write, you don’t have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.
When you ask people, ‘What’s the opposite of fragile?,’ they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That’s not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.
I’m in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God’s terms. My God isn’t the God of George Bush.
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.
The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.