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In Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2–3 per cent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 per cent of the body’s energy when the body is at rest.
Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast.
But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively.
Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.
These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful!
We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance.
enables, culture forbids.’
money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
Current US banking law permits the bank to repeat this exercise seven more times.
people agreed to represent imaginary goods – goods that do not exist in the present – with a special kind of money they called ‘credit’.
selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history
The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour.
Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.
THE MODERN ECONOMY grows thanks to our trust in the future and to the willingness of capitalists to reinvest their profits in production.
The discovery won Haber (who during the war also pioneered the use of poison gas in battle) a Nobel Prize in 1918. In chemistry, not in peace.
Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need.
How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.
The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb.
One interesting conclusion is that money does indeed bring happiness.
But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.
