Kindle Notes & Highlights
In spite of the intellectual and emotional preparation, we are not exempt from the fallibility that rules supreme during revolutionary moments. We can react to events, but we cannot predict them. That means that we cannot have a firm strategy unless we call flexibility a strategy. I call it a tactic, and I endorse it. It allows us to study and prepare for various scenarios. In order to find something firm, we can rely only on our values and convictions. And that is what we are doing.
My philosophy has guided me both in making money and in spending it on making the world a better place—but it is not about money; it is about the complicated relationship between thinking and reality.
Open society will always have its enemies, and each generation has to reaffirm its commitment to open society for it to survive.
Mankind’s ability to harness the forces of nature, both for constructive and destructive purposes, continues to grow while our ability to govern ourselves properly fluctuates, and it is now at a low ebb.
Companies earn their profits by exploiting their environment. Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment. This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it.
The business model of social media companies is based on advertising. Their true customers are the advertisers. But gradually a new business model is emerging, one based not only on advertising but also on selling products and services directly to users. They exploit the data they control, bundle the services they offer, and use discriminatory pricing to keep for themselves more of the benefits that otherwise they would have to share with consumers. This enhances their profitability even further—but the bundling of services and discriminatory pricing undermine the efficiency of the market
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Europe has much stronger privacy and data protection laws than America. Moreover, US law has adopted a strange doctrine first proposed by Supreme Court Justice Robert Bork: it measures harm as an increase in the price paid by customers for services received—and that is almost impossible to prove when most services are provided for free. This leaves out of consideration the valuable data that platform companies collect from their users.
The choice confronting the EU could be better formulated as one between a multispeed and a multitrack approach. In a multispeed approach, member states have to agree in advance on the ultimate outcome; in a multitrack approach, member states are free to form coalitions of the willing to pursue particular goals on which they agree. The multitrack approach is obviously more flexible, but the European bureaucracy favored the multispeed approach. That is an important contributor to the rigidity of the EU’s structure.
I use “open society” as shorthand for a society in which the rule of law prevails, as opposed to rule by a single individual, and where the role of the state is to protect human rights and individual freedom. In my personal view, an open society should pay special attention to those who suffer from discrimination or social exclusion and those who can’t defend themselves. By contrast, authoritarian regimes use whatever instruments of control they possess to maintain themselves in power at the expense of those whom they exploit and suppress.
now comes the difficult part. Those of us who want to preserve the open society must work together and form an effective alliance. We have a task that can’t be left to governments.
The freedoms that prevailed during the chaotic Yeltsin years have all but disappeared under Putin. Still, there is a more subtle lesson to be learned. It is dangerous to build systemic reforms on a close association with one particular government. Systemic reforms need broad public participation and support. That is what makes them irreversible.
(Being long means owning a stock; being short means selling a stock one does not own.) Going long has unlimited potential on the upside but limited exposure on the downside, being short is the reverse. The asymmetry manifests itself in the following way: losing on a long position reduces one’s risk exposure, while losing on a short position increases it. As a result, one can be more patient being long and wrong than being short and wrong. The asymmetry serves to discourage the short selling of stocks.
to defend open societies, it is not enough to rely on the rule of law; you must also stand up for what you believe in.
The idea of a disembodied intellect or reason is a figment of our imagination.
The economist Frank Knight (1921) introduced an important distinction between risk and uncertainty. Risk is when there are multiple possible future states and the probabilities of those different future states occurring are known. Risk is well defined by the laws of probability and statistics. Knightian uncertainty occurs when the probabilities of future states or even the nature of possible future states is not known.
The three salient features of Popper’s scheme are the symmetry between prediction and explanation, the asymmetry between verification and falsification, and the central role of testing. These three features allow science to grow, improve, and innovate.
Lionel Robbins, who was my professor at the London School of Economics, defined the task of economics as the allocation of limited means to unlimited alternative ends
