J > J's Quotes

“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan

“I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strength, happiness and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own”
― Goethe Wolfgang, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Ordinary humans will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset—their personal data—in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets. If, later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they might find it increasingly difficult, especially as they might come to rely on the network for all their decisions, and even for their healthcare and physical survival.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“In the longer term, by bringing together enough data and enough computing power, the data giants could hack the deepest secrets of life, and then use this knowledge not just to make choices for us or manipulate us but also to reengineer organic life and create inorganic life-forms. Selling advertisements may be necessary to sustain the giants in the short term, but tech companies often evaluate apps, products, and other companies according to the data they harvest rather than according to the money they generate. A popular app may lack a business model and may even lose money in the short term, but as long as it sucks data, it could be worth billions.4 Even if you don’t know how to cash in on the data today, it is worth having it because it might hold the key to controlling and shaping life in the future. I don’t know for certain that the data giants explicitly think about this in such terms, but their actions indicate that they value the accumulation of data in terms beyond those of mere dollars and cents. Ordinary humans will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset—their personal data—in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets. If, later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they might find it increasingly difficult, especially as they might come to rely on the network for all their decisions, and even for their healthcare and physical survival.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“He further explained, “We started a project to see if we could get better at suggesting groups that will be meaningful to you. We started building artificial intelligence to do this. And it works. In the first six months, we helped 50% more people join meaningful communities.” His ultimate goal is “to help 1 billion people join meaningful communities….If we can do this, it will not only turn around the whole decline in community membership we’ve seen for decades, it will start to strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” This is such an important goal that Zuckerberg vowed “to change Facebook’s whole mission to take this on.”3 Zuckerberg is certainly correct in lamenting the breakdown of human communities. Yet several months after Zuckerberg made this vow, and just as this book was going to print, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that data entrusted to Facebook was harvested by third parties and used to manipulate elections around the world. This made a mockery of Zuckerberg’s lofty promises, and shattered public trust in Facebook. One can only hope that before undertaking the building of new human communities, Facebook first commits itself to protecting the privacy and security of existing communities.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Zuckerberg says that Facebook is committed “to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience” with others.8 Yet what people might really need are the tools to connect to their own experiences. In the name of “sharing experiences,” people are encouraged to understand what happens to them in terms of how others see it. If something exciting happens, the gut instinct of Facebook users is to pull out their smartphones, take a picture, post it online, and wait for the “likes.” In the process they barely notice what they themselves feel. Indeed, what they feel is increasingly determined by the online reactions. People estranged from their bodies, senses, and physical environment are likely to feel alienated and disoriented. Pundits often blame such feelings of alienation on the decline of religious and national bonds, but losing touch with your body is probably more important. Humans lived for millions of years without religions and without nations; they can probably live happily without them in the twenty-first century too. Yet they cannot live happily if they are disconnected from their bodies. If you don’t feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Secular ethics relies not on obeying the edicts of this or that god, but rather on a deep appreciation of suffering. For example, secular people abstain from murder not because some ancient book forbids it but because killing inflicts immense suffering on sentient beings. There is something deeply troubling and dangerous about people who avoid killing just because “God says so.” Such people are motivated by obedience rather than compassion, and what will they do if they come to believe that their god commands them to kill heretics, witches, adulterers, or foreigners?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - and airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia

“This “fertility crisis” has potentially dire consequences for the future funding of the welfare state, and it cannot be disentangled from difficult political questions concerning reforms of pension systems and even whether to allow more immigration. A straightforward explanation would be that women are now having careers instead of children—a view that is popular on the religious right. But while the relationship between female labor force participation and fertility was unambiguously negative thirty years ago, today it is positive: countries where women spend a lot of time in the household tend to have lower fertility rates than countries where women are very active in the labor market. Our contention is that the explanation for the fertility crisis flows from the same underlying logic as the explanation for the political underrepresentation of women or the shift in gender norms.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“We agree that, in the short and medium run, values are very powerful. But in the longer run, material forces shape both institutions and values. Changes in production technology, in our argument, drive the emergence and demise of patriarchy by giving and then taking away a productivity advantage to male labor. Competition over resources in societies with labor-intensive agriculture creates patriarchal family institutions.12 Social norms are principally a result rather than a cause of patriarchy: families socialize their children in ways that help them navigate the strategic environment they will face.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“Where economic efficiency gives males a bargaining advantage on account of greater mobility of their human capital from a gendered division of labor, families do best by socializing a daughter to cultivate the femininity that will help her win her a good man and the docility that will help her keep him. Because human history has been agrarian for most of recorded time, these are the values—let’s call it patriarchy—most familiar to humanity.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“To be sure, publicly provided day care helps reduce the problem because it shortens career interruptions and gives women more flexibility in balancing work and career. But child care does not eliminate the problem because women are still more likely than men to leave work for childbirth and for caring for sick children or elderly parents. In jobs where there is a premium on continuous careers, this means that employers are less likely to invest in the human capital of women. In response, women shift their career investment toward (more general skills) occupations with high job flexibility.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“Where those jobs are in short supply, the desire of women to have active careers forces them to sacrifice family by having fewer children. The only effective way to deal with this problem, we argue, is for the state to create or subsidize jobs that are highly flexible in terms of hours and career interruptions. This conclusion reserves a large role for government intervention, a role we suggest is warranted and indeed required to address the large distributional consequences of social norms that underwrite the traditional sexual division of labor.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“As many countries in Europe experience growing fiscal strains as a result of low fertility and an aging population, active family policies are likely to become more important—not just as a response to political demands, but also as an economic imperative. The key for the success of such policies in today’s world is not that they subsidize families with children—a strategy that, as noted, has met with limited success when attempted—but rather that they empower women to pursue careers without having to sacrifice family. This means spending on high-quality, full-time child care, and the creation, or subsidization, of flexible, general skills jobs in the public sector.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“the declining economic gains from marriage highlight the nonmaterial reasons for marriage, including mutual love and respect. But for the relationships in which these break down, divorce more easily results.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“In rich democracies, the same factors that confer household bargaining power on women also have a positive effect on fertility. We interpret this to mean that women would like to “have it all” as long as having children does not block their possibilities of accumulating human capital in the labor market. Trying to boost fertility with a campaign of pro-family rhetoric and incentives is likely to have precisely the opposite effect as intended.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“Liberal market economies managed to achieve relatively high gender equality, surely inadvertently, by keeping labor markets fluid in ways that did not put women at a disadvantage against men. Class inequality is the greater problem than gender equality in those countries. There are more female managers in those economies than in the more generous welfare states, but income inequality is stark among women as well as among men. It is also true that women tend to cluster in the low-skill jobs at the bottom of the wage dispersion. In the past the family compensated for this inequality to some extent because higher-earning males were more likely to marry lower-earning females. This pattern has now reversed in that economically successful men now are much more likely to marry equally successful women, increasing the inequality in the distribution of family income. This trend is magnified by a higher probability of low-income females ending up as single mothers. The challenge in these countries with short-term job commitments is therefore to improve the life chances of men and women without means, and especially low-income single parent families, by increasing opportunities for skill acquisition and retraining as necessary.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“The coordinated market economies of continental Europe and Japan unintentionally hurt women when they protected labor from layoffs, because women cannot compete with men in committing credibly to human capital accumulation over long careers. Although female political representation tends to be higher in these countries than in the district-based systems of liberal market economies, gender-friendly policies have not yet made much of a dent in many outcomes of concern to women, such as female employment, the gender wage gap, male share of household work, and the ability to have children without negative career effects.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“Life for women is getting better, but women are not yet equal citizens. Until it becomes a commonplace that fathers are as responsible for the care of children and home as mothers, markets will discriminate against women. Although this is more true in labor markets characterized by long-term contracts than elsewhere, it is true to some degree everywhere. It is time for men to share the same burdens and joys of family work. Judging from mortality statistics, less pressure to be strong, brave, and successful might do a man good.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“Imagine working on a presentation that you need to deliver at a meeting. In the days leading up to the meeting, you work hard but you vacillate. The ideas may be there, but tough choices need to be made on how to pull it all together. Once the deadline closes in, though, there is no more time for dawdling. Scarcity forces all the choices.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Imagine working on a presentation that you need to deliver at a meeting. In the days leading up to the meeting, you work hard but you vacillate. The ideas may be there, but tough choices need to be made on how to pull it all together. Once the deadline closes in, though, there is no more time for dawdling. Scarcity forces all the choices. Abstractions become concrete. Without the last push, you may be creative without producing a final product.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Another manifestation of tunneling is the decision to multitask. We may check e-mail while “listening in” on a conference call, or squeeze in a bit more e-mail on the cell phone over dinner. This has the benefit of saving time, but it comes at a cost: missing something on the call or at dinner or writing a sloppy e-mail.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Companies are not immune to the psychology of scarcity. For example, during lean times, many firms slash their marketing budgets. Some experts believe that this is not a sound business decision. In fact, it looks a lot like tunneling.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“We would argue that the poor do have lower effective capacity than those who are well off. This is not because they are less capable, but rather because part of their mind is captured by scarcity.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“While Steve Jobs was no doubt an inspiring genius worthy of praise, the fact that the iPhone/iPad empire was built on these State-funded technologies provides a far more accurate tale of technological and economic change than what is offered by mainstream discussions. Given the critical role of the State in enabling companies like Apple, it is especially curious that the debate surrounding Apple’s tax avoidance has tended to overlook this fact. Apple must pay tax not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the ultimate example of a company that requires the public purse to be large and risk-loving enough to continue making the investments that entrepreneurs like Jobs will later capitalize on (Mazzucato 2013b).”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

“To make matters worse, we have seen how the constant struggle with poverty (and scarcity generally) further depletes self-control. When you can afford so little, so many more things need to be resisted, and your self-control ends up being run down.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much