Siddharth > Books: non-fiction‎ (39)

The true believers in global warming similarly exhibited a moralistic fanaticism, justified by the transcendent importance of their cause. The basic narrative by which they lived was one familiar from the history of religious sects down the ages, the conviction that the end of the world was nigh, thanks to the wickedness of mankind and could only be saved if humanity acknowledged its sins and went through a profound change of behavior.

It means in the world picture of press agency, a job, domesticity, interest in some harmless diversion such as baseball and fishing, and a strong antipathy toward abstract ideas. This is the Philistine version of man in pursuit of happiness. Even Carlyle's doctrine of blessedness through work has overtones of strenuousness which are repugnant to the man of today. (p. 94)

I read this book after seeing [Sreejith’s 5-star review][1]. It was a habit-changing book for me.

The

I read this book after seeing [Sreejith’s 5-star review][1]. It was a habit-changing book for me.

The most important take-away for me was the difference between a writer and an archivist. As I have
been reading more and more non-fiction books in the past couple years, I realized that there were
several connections that I was noticing but wasn’t really making on paper anywhere. I was making
notes about separate pieces of literature, but I wasn’t really connecting them. My behavior was that
of an archivist.

To move into a writer’s mindset I realized that I have to start thinking about how anything I read
is changing my mindset and actually write my thoughts down (apart from the things that have already
been said by the author).

A few other things that were expressed very well in the book:

The criteria for a convincing argument are always the same, regardless of who the author is or the
status of the publisher: They have to be coherent and based on facts. Truth does not belong to
anyone; it is the outcome of the scientific exchange of written ideas. This is why the
presentation and the production of knowledge cannot be separated, but are rather two sides of the
same coin (Peters and Schäfer 2006, 9). If writing is the medium of research and studying nothing
else than research, then there is no reason not to work as if nothing else counts than writing.

P.S In a crazy connection, the author says that the book about the rise of the shipping
container, The Box, that I read a few months ago was one of the reasons he realized that simple
ideas find it especially hard to become popular and widely adopted. I read The Box because of my
interest in shipping containers and the logistics world in general only a few months ago.

There are a million reviews of this book out there, I don’t think I have
anything new to say about the book. I do wa

There are a million reviews of this book out there, I don’t think I have
anything new to say about the book. I do want to look at how Sandberg approaches
the root cause of the issue that she deals with in this book: not enough women
in leadership roles.

She begins by dividing the barriers into two categories: Internal and
External. This was a very useful framework to think about the issue and try to
improve the situation by making structural changes. The book is full of
anecdotes, her conversations, and her advice to several groups of people. It is
also relentlessly researched, there are no assertions or gut feelings in this
book, everything is based on numbers from studies. For me, this was a book both
about the main issue and a book about careers and how to make decisions that
will affect you a few years down the line.

Two things I took away from this book that changed the way I think:

There is always an opportunity cost, and I don’t know anyone who feels
comfortable with all their decisions. As a result, we inadvertently hold that
discomfort against those who remind us of the path not taken.

Looking at the people I resented and have resented in the past, I can see them
enter this criteria almost all the time.

The example that Sandberg talks about around the beginning of the book:

Women pay the price for this structural advantage that men have. They don’t
get promotions despite appearing to have the same opportunities.

Some of the other things that I have heard in passing but did not understand
completely before I read this book:

To this day, I’m embarrassed that I didn’t realize that pregnant women needed
reserved parking until I experienced my own aching feet. As one of Google’s
most senior women, didn’t I have a special responsibility to think of this?
But like Sergey, it had never occurred to me. The other pregnant women must
have suffered in silence, not wanting to ask for special treatment. Or maybe
they lacked the confidence or seniority to demand that the problem be
fixed. Having one pregnant woman at the top—even one who looked like a
whale—made the difference.

I don’t remember thinking about my future career differently from the male
students. I also don’t remember any conversations about someday balancing work
and children. My friends and I assumed that we would have both. Men and women
competed openly and aggressively with one another in classes, activities, and
job interviews. Just two generations removed from my grandmother, the playing
field seemed to be level.

This experiment supports what research has already clearly shown: success and
likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for
women.3 When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a
woman is successful, people of both genders like her less. This truth is both
shocking and unsurprising: shocking because no one would ever admit to
stereotyping on the basis of gender and unsurprising because clearly we do.

Then he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job—fast
growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there
are people to do them. When companies grow more slowly or stop growing, there
is less to do and too many people to not be doing them. Politics and
stagnation set in, and everyone falters.

One thing that helps is to remember that feedback, like truth, is not
absolute. Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences,
which allows us to know what impression we make on others. The information is
revealing and potentially uncomfortable, which is why all of us would rather
offer feedback to those who welcome it. If I make an observation or
recommendation and someone reacts badly—or even just visibly tenses up—I
quickly learn to save my comments for things that really matter.

But even if mothers are more naturally inclined toward nurturing, fathers can
match that skill with knowledge and effort. If women want to succeed more at
work and if men want to succeed more at home, these expectations have to be
challenged. As Gloria Steinem once observed, “It’s not about biology, but
about consciousness.”9 We overcome biology with consciousness in other areas.

True partnership in our homes does more than just benefit couples today; it
also sets the stage for the next generation. The workplace has evolved more
than the home in part because we enter it as adults, so each generation
experiences a new dynamic. But the homes we create tend to be more rooted in
our childhoods. My generation grew up watching our mothers do the child care
and housework while our fathers earned the wages.

I started noticing how often employees were judged not by their objective
performance, but by the subjective standard of how well they fit in.

Dr. John Probasco of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine told me
that my story about women being more reluctant than men to raise their hands
rang true for him so he decided to do away with the old hand-raising system
during rounds. Instead, he started calling on male and female students
evenly. He quickly realized that the women knew the answers just as well—or
even better—than the men. In one day he increased female participation. By
making one small change to his behavior, he changed a much larger dynamic.

Without calling for major overhauls, they tackled the soft stuff—small
adjustments students could make immediately, like paying more attention to the
language they used in class. They laid out a new, communal definition of
leadership: “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your
presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.”

There is always an opportunity cost, and I don’t know any woman who feels
comfortable with all her decisions. As a result, we inadvertently hold that
discomfort against those who remind us of the path not taken.

This book is everything that it claims to be on the book jacket. It "uncovers the inner workings of the institutions behind these economic manipulatio

This book is everything that it claims to be on the book jacket. It "uncovers the inner workings of the institutions behind these economic manipulations". In particular, it looks at some of the incredibly global institutions that are name dropped in a lot of contexts: World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. There are several stories here about loans that were given to countries which were supposed to build schools or upgrade the city hall building of a bustling city or one of a myriad of other reasons but never did that or help the people the money was supposed to help in any way.

I must admit that it was a pretty shocking revelation at several points. In particular, we get stories from the people in the field, the rank and file of organizations like the World Bank who are going abroad to assess if a given loan should be sanctioned or a banker who used to work in an island that was being used for offshore banking.

They tell stories about how their job affected the places that they were working in or the places they went to in Africa (this book focuses a lot on some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa) or about the ways in which the management and people above them were basically apathetic to the consequences of the things that their jobs were enabling. These stories are all backed up with actual data from reports or news articles which show the outcomes of the things that are discussed.

I particularly liked that the book doesn't work as a list of testimonials where the reader is simply supposed to believe the people who are telling the story and the editor and not really question where they got their data. This was a refreshing non-fiction book about global economics, in that sense.

I learnt a lot of things about the global economy. The chapter on offshore banking in Jersey, Englang, the chapter on exploitation of the Iraqi people and government in the name of "Production Sharing Agreements", the chapter about the strange policies that were implemented in Philippines despite continued realizations at different levels of the heirarchy that whatever they were doing was simply not working.

The most important insights for me came in the 11th Chapter by James S. Henry, The Mirage of Debt Relief. This chapter really shook me and my assumptions about national debt. I didn't know much about national debt before I started reading the book, but my belief was that having high foreign debt was quite common in most economies and that it wasn't really something to think much about because "banks and governments don't default on loans"! This assumption of mine was completely blown out of the water by the things that Henry shows in this chapter.

Debt goes to the Finance ministry of a government with no oversight or accountability to the tax payer.

The existence of this cycle might appear to be semi-obvious if you have followed the trajectory of some countries and their economies: They get huge loans from the World Bank or from a group of foreign lenders, but the money never ends up making any difference. Eventually, the country gets a follow-up loan or everyone gives up on the country's economy. Corruption and transparency issues are pegged as the root cause of this problem.

Here's the sitch: The debt-based development model doesn't work when it comes to low-middle income countries where the government is a weak institution and almost always over-run by corruption.

The World Bank model of neo-liberalism peddles the "free-market" as the silver bullet which is going to solve all the problems that plague the lower income economies of the world. But the problem with this model is that it is focused on lending to the government, reducing the government's role in the economy, bringing in private players for local services and foreign investment for new industries, effectively reducing the government to a license-issuing institution with no real power to set policy or even the minimum wage that should be paid to citizens or even control the amount of local labor that must be used for a given project.

In search of the free-market, the government has just accepted World Bank advise and reduced it's own role and made itself weaker. This makes it even more simpler for corrupt individuals to take over the government and fleece future and past loans even more efficiently! This kicks off the cycle which leads to a small elite who control the government, are extremely rich, keep their assets safely in First World economies in offshore investments, thus ensuring that anyone that the loan was originally meant for will never benefit from it.

The list of projects that were funded by ECAs from across the First World is quite long and each project has it's own problems. As the author of this chapter (chapter 10), Bruce Rich, introduces a lot of issues with ECAs: Lack of oversight, lack of accountability to the tax payer even though they can enjoy the benefits of tax money and the government's clout, an impenetrable curtain of secrecy that ensures that they don't even have to publish the list of projects that they approved and funded! The author uses a phrase that can be used in several situations including while describing the development that was supposed to come from the huge loans that have been sanctioned over the past few years to the lower income countries:

perpetually around the corner

There are some important numbers and a little bit of discussion about why China, India and Korea had some structural, geographical and political advantages and thus were able to mostly ignore advise from the IMF and outright reject the neo-liberalism that is being peddled as the "road to development".

I could not find anything problematic about the book. The sources are extensive and most of the facts that are not just personal experiences are backed up with official sources. My reading list after reading this book has a couple of papers about ECAs and how economists in the First World view them. The one thing that might threw me at first was how old all the data was. Reading the introduction gives some background on this, it appears as if this book has been around for a while but wasn't published by anyone because no one wanted to touch a book that was flaty critical about the global economic system and what had basically become a cartel of the richest countries bending loans and lower income countries to their will.

China and India alone account for about $500 billion of this developing country "present value debt." Both countries have been careful about foreign borrowing, and they have also largely ignored IMF / World Bank policy advice. The result is that their foreign debt burdens are small relative to national income. Both countries -- partly because they refuse the follow orthodox neoliberal policies -- now have high growth economies and large stockpiles of foreign reserves.

-- p.222

The fundamental problem, glossed over by some debt-relief campaigners and conventional "end poverty now" economists, is that comabting poverty is not just a question of providing malaria nets, vaccinces, and drinking water, or incremental increases in education, capital, technology and aid. Ultimately, as China's example shows, long-term poverty reductions requires the promotion of deep-seated structural change. This implies the redistribution of social assets like land, education, technology, and political power. These are concepts that BWI [Bretton Woods Institutions] technocrats may never understand -- or may recoil from in horro. But they are the root of every major development success story that we know.

-- p.254

The Lever of Riches is a great book. I think I say that about a lot of books though. Lever of Riches is a 3-part book. In the first part, Mok

The Lever of Riches is a great book. I think I say that about a lot of books though. Lever of Riches is a 3-part book. In the first part, Mokyr presents a concise history of Technological progress starting in 500 BC and ending around 915. In the second part, Mokyr compares the relative technological progress in three periods across time and space and the possible reasons (he touches on religion, culture, geography and national sentiment as possible reasons). In the last part, he draws an analogy between Biological Evolution and Technological progress.

I liked the first and second parts immensely. I didn't find the last part (the analogy) very intersting or useful.

If the West is on teh whole comfortable, even opulent, compared to the appaling poverty still rampant in most of Asia and Africa, it is in large part thanks to its technology.

Excellent structure: I started noticing this in non-fiction books after the majorly disorienting narrative in The Box (Levinson). That was also a great book, but the fact that the narrative wasn't chronological really messed up my comprehension of the book. Lever of Riches stays on track and moves linearly through the Ancient times, the Industrial Revolution to the late 20th century. There are no unnecessary breaks, few parallel narratives which are always geographically isolated.

Description and analysis of other prevalent theories: The author leans heavily on work done by others in his attempt to prove his own theory. And along this line, it was fairly clear to me, every step along the way that whatever the author was saying was thoroughly researched and that the author had seriously considered what other people believed and had not dismissed their points of view out of hand.

History of technological progress: The second part of the book is a concise history of technological progress. There are several diagrams and a lot of dates and names. I felt that the author did justice to this topic and I learnt a LOT just from this part of the book. If anything, I highly recommend this part of the book in isolation. A better book of technological history definitely exists out there and the author admits as much, but I felt that the detail Mokyr goes into is just right. (My opinion is bound to change when I read a more thorough history which touches on some of the things Mokyr skipped over)

Great comparisons: The comparisons that make up the third part of the book are definitely my highlight from this book. I liked the times and countries he compared because I have struggled in the past to understand the vast gap in the servies and quality of life in these places first hand, and this book helped me understand one probable cause for these differences.

Not crazy about the Evolution analogy: The last part of the book is an attempt by Mokyr to draw several parallels between biological evolution and technological progress. The analogy seems to hold in most cases and there are several holes, etc. In general though, I didn't like this part of the book as much as I liked the preceding 2 parts.

In conjunction with other inventions, power technology created the gap between Europe and the rest of the world, a temporary dis-equilibrium that allowed the Europeans to establish global political and military domination.

Hindi doctrine holds that castepromotion is possible through re-incarnation if one lives an appropriately resigned and obedient life. ... Poverty was holy and action was vanity. ... A fiendish failure proof system to ensure the status quo

A gentleman only concerns himself with the lofty ideals of pure science, scientific research for it's own sake

Z is a really good book. It leads you to think critically about the government and the people in it, especially the beaurocrats (not the politicians)

Z is a really good book. It leads you to think critically about the government and the people in it, especially the beaurocrats (not the politicians) and the power they weild over people. What does it mean to be righteous? What does it mean to do the right thing at any cost? There are several books that go through those dilemmas. Several classics, surely.

Z is another book that does that. What would you do if you were a poor carpenter, dependent on the police's grace for your license, if you saw a murder happen? Would you report it? Would you volunteer to reveal what you know? Would you stick to your story even when you know the consequences? It's hard to describe this book because there's so much going on. At the core of the story is the murder of Z. What follows, is a sometimes-comical, sometimes-Kafka-esque, mostly realistic game of shadows and mirrors as people try to mask their role in the murder.

In every man—especially in a porter—there are smoldering embers from a life never lived, a house never built, a pickup license never obtained. At the slightest breath, the embers flare up and the past comes to life.

Such things keep bobbing to the surface and there are left, unexamined forever, because no one can wrest the truth from those who don’t want to tell it.

P.S: If you have ever had to get a group of engineers to explain what their system does to you with a diagram and they were unable to explain it to you despite 4 hours of meetings over 2 weeks, you know what the author is talking about in this quote.

Every once in a while, you come across a movie so good, so intricate and subtle, so resonant with your own experiences around the system the movie is depicting, that you are stuck watching it in a never-ending loop. Shanghai (2012), a Hindi movie, was one of those movies for me. It perfectly portrayed everything that I had experienced and heard about from other people about the way the government really works, about how contracts are awarded, and how people talk to each other when they are the ultimate decision makers in their own little play-world.

I found out that the movie was actually adapted from a book on my n-th re-watch of the movie in the first few weeks of September this month. Once I realized that a book existed, I had to read it. And now, I have read it and I am very glad that I did!

Z is a really good book. There are several parallel narratives which go hand-in-hand as the story progresses:

In all these narratives, the common thread is often Z. The other common thread is the system that they live in. Implicitly, they understand their place in the system. The General knows that by being at the meeting, he has undermined the command of the Chief. The Chief knows that by being there, he's basically taken over control from the Assistant Chief. The Commissioner can't act when a "full-blown General" is at the scene. Yango wants people to see him having coffee with The Commissioner. Whether they like it or not, whether their interest is on the left or the right, whether they are Communist-Zionist or Hellenic-Christians, the system has kept them aprised of their place and their responsibilities. The Baron doesn't see a choice when he's asked to beat up people, he must do it. He has a stall and he would only be asking for trouble if he were to deny to perform an act that ensures his place in the system.

This book forced me to ask the question: What system are you a part of? What is your place in the system? Do you know your responsibilities? Are you performing them? Are you doing the right thing?

Hard questions, and half imagined, I am sure.

When he compared the number of patients he cured with the number of human beings the world over who could not buy even the most ordinary medicines, it was enough to make him shudder. The same with begging. What was the good of giving money to the poor? The balance of poverty on the planet remained unaltered. For the world to change, the system had to change.

-- Z on the importance of systemic change

His own pulse was calm. For the speech ahead, he’d merely made some notes. When you have something to say, it’s not difficult to say it. The difficulty comes when you have nothing to say and must talk anyway.

-- Z on oration

I imagine myself at a railway crossing and the guard has put up the chain between us, an endless train roars over the rails, with as many cars as the years I shall not see you. Only at fleeting moments, through the spaces between the cars, I catch a rare image of you waiting for me on the far side.

-- Mrs. Z on Z

What was politics anyway, Hatzis wondered. Did it hold nothing sacred? Or maybe there was no difference at all between the bourgeois parties? Sometimes the one rose, sometimes the other, like two peasants sharing the same mule, and the mule—the common people—just went on carrying them one after the other upon its back, understanding the change only from the difference in weight.

-- The Tiger on Politics

The first chapter where Z narrates in first person is the best chapter in the book. I always wondered what that character was thinking and what his beliefs were whenever I saw the movie, this chapter was incredibly enlightening on that account.

P.S: This was also the first time that I was able to fit all my #quote Kindle notes into the review of a book!

This is a great book! I started reading this book because I realized how much shipping has changed the things that one has access to, it was also part

This is a great book! I started reading this book because I realized how much shipping has changed the things that one has access to, it was also part of the book recommendations on one of the Ezra Klein Show podcast episodes. I don't remember who recommended this book anymore or in what context, though! I am glad I read it nonetheless.

First, a brief word about the good stuff. This is a comprehensive and very very detailed account of how containers started, who started using them, how they came to be standardized and why they make sense beyond a given scale. It refers to a lot of incidents that proved to be rather important for the adoption of containers: the aftermath of the second World War, the Vietnam war, dockworkers unions across the world, shipping companies, freight forwarders, railroad operators, trucking companies. It's hard to think of anyone from the factory right up to the end consumer that this book doesn't touch or talk about.

Perhaps the most stunning thing throughout the book is the consistent resistance that container shipping had from every single person involved in the old process: unions didn't like container shipping, ports didn't like containers, governments weren't really convinced and were far too slow to adopt or create the specifications for standardized containers. Undoubtedly, a significant percentage of the time, most of the resistance ends in a placid acceptance and a sudden interest in getting deeply involved in the process of container shipping (in the form of huge government investment in modernising ports, subsidising the building of containes and container ships, negotiating contracts with shipping carriers that promise them space and cargo at ports)

There is one caveat though: The book is long, and it's not very coherent, the author chose to tell the story of how containers took over global shipping not as a timeline starting from non-container shipping (break-bulk) to container shipping, and rather, as a story of incidents which overlap in time, but are mostly independent in place and time of occurence. That makes the book confusing to read because there are several references to what happened in 1967 and it gets harder and harder to understand in the first half of the book until it all comes together in the second half of the book. That is my only gripe with the book.

Nevertheless, it's an incredibly informative book about a fairly simple concept's hard journey from being an idea to the finished product that now powers all global commercial shipping.

Nationalistic history-writing: In Germany, the lies have a blonde character. Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do no love your own country as much as you hate somebody else's. ... The following is a quotation - "Tragedy is a condition first discovered by te Pope for the subjection of mankind. But that is the provoking thing about these people: they foist this barbarism on us, and then try to make us content with it by having us adopt their own mass-man inability to distinguish between things. We are to end by no longer knowing that the whole of their 'technical comfort' amounts to nothing more than one gigantic swindle ... Or do they really think they are going to stop us from making distinctions and reduce everything to dead level - equate a Brueghelian feast of the past with a modern meal out of cans; the rewards of an auto trip with that of a walking tour; the costly silk stockings of yesterday, and the rayon stockings of today's office girls - all calculated to turn the beholder into a misogynist.

Following a series of articles placed by Goebbels in the newspapers, the wife of a tenant came to see me in fear and trembling. In Jesus' name, how was she to protect her children? They were all going to be dragged off to be raised in English, American, or Russian orphan asylums, according to newspapers! Nota bene, this woman spent several years in America, as a laundress; she still speaks a little English, and she has a number of quite warm recollections of Boston - yet she believes these stories about the foreign devils. Really, this people, only yesterday so intelligent and discriminating, seems to have been overcome by a disease of the mind. They noe believe everything they are told, provided it is done with sufficient aplomb.

Certainly, we are going to sit in judgement on the visible individuals who pulled the strings here, certainly the wood for the gallows on which I hope to see Hitler, Goring, Goebbbels, Papen et al., hung has already been thoughtfully put aside. And certainly, too, all of us Germans will have to take our Cross upon our backs and carry it through the Dark Valley of Sorrow before the Absolute is attained. But is there a nation today so lacking in perspective as to deny the possibility that such a mass psychosis could at some time in its hitory occur within its own boundaries? Do people really go so far as to accuse unarmed German intellectuals of lethargy when, during the first two years of the Hitler regime, at least, the British Cabinet, with every possible weapon at its disposal, was itself too indolent to smoke the brown rats out of their holes?

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet—and this is its horror!—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world.

The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new “righteousness.”

The attitude of the German people toward their own past, which all experts on the German question had puzzled over for fifteen years, could hardly have been more clearly demonstrated: they themselves did not much care one way or the other, and did not particularly mind the presence of murderers at large in the country, since none of them were likely to commit murder of their own free will; however, if world opinion—or rather, what the Germans called das Ausland, collecting all countries outside Germany into a singular noun—became obstinate and demanded that these people be punished, they were perfectly willing to oblige, at least up to a point.

This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless. None of us had a conviction so deeply rooted that we could have taken upon ourselves a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning.” ... The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be “practically useless,” at least, not in the long run.

We can't say for sure that smartphones are to be blamed, but the timing is very suspicious

As always, it is difficult to say for sure what the cause is in a trend over time

That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, becomes a mask of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where unorthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent. -- Learned Hand

I'm a very serious "possibilist". That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reasons, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview

When women are educated, all kinds of wonderful things happen in societies.

Some aspects of the future are easier to predict than others. ... Demographic forecasts are amazingly accurate decades into the future because the systems involved -- essentially, births and deaths -- are quite simple. Children are born grow up, have more children, and then die. Each individual cycle takes roughly 70 years.

If the UN forecasts for population growth are correct, and if incomes in Asia and Africa keep growing as now, then the center of gravity of the world market will shift over the next 20 years from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Today, the people living in rich countries around the North Atlantic, who represent 11 percent of the world population, make up 60 percent of the Level 4 consumer market. Already by 2027, if incomes keep growing worldwide as they are doing now, then that figure will have shrunk to 50 percent. By 2040, 60 percent of Level 4 consumers will live outside the West. Yes, I think the Western domination of the world economy will soon be over.

She was able to think critically and express herself with razor-sharp logic and perfect rhetoric at a moment of extreme tension.

The world cannot be understood without numbers, nor through numbers alone. A country cannot function without a government, but the government cannot solve every problem. Neither the public sector nor the private sector is always the answer. No single measure of a good society can drive every other aspect of its development. It's not either/or. It's both and it's case-by-case.

The clock made us time keepers, then time savers, and now time servers. ... Nature was the basis for time. But once we invented a clock, our invention was the basis of time, not the sun or moon. Introduction of a clock into a culture is not merely a way to bind time, it is a transformation of the way of thinking in that culture.

An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and oppose, compared to a Huxleyan one.

Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo, we do not know what we will know.

We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes. You may feel a sting, but it will not be as bad as you expect. This kind of misprediction may have a purpose: to motivate us to perform important acts.

It is the venture capitalist who invested in a speculative company and sold his stake to unimaginative investors who is the beneficiary of the Black Swan, not the "me, too" investors.

Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking.

As a matter of fact, I believe that a large portion of the mythological conception of the world which reaches far into the most modern religions is nothing but psychology projected into the outer world. The dim perception of psychic factors and relations of the unconscious was taken as a model in the construction of a transcendental reality, which is destined to be changed again by science into psychology of the unconscious.

We see then that something is forgotten for its own sake, and where this is not possible the defensive tendency misses the target and causes something else to be forgotten -- something less significant, but which has fallen into associative connection with the disagreeable material

I am sorry to confess that I belong to that class of unworthy individuals before whom the spirits cease their activities and the supernatural disappears, so that I have never been in position to experience anything personally that would stimulate belief in the miraculous. Like everybody else, I have had forebodings and experienced misfortunes; but the two evaded each other, so that nothing followed the foreboding, and the misfortune struck me unannounced. When as a young man I lived alone in a strange city I frequently heard my name suddenly pronounced by an unmistakable, dear voice, and I then made a note of the exact moment of the hallucination in order to inquire carefully of those at home what had occurred at that time. There was nothing to it. On the other hand, I later worked among my patients calmly and without foreboding while my child almost bled to death. Nor have I ever been able to recognize as unreal phenomena any of the forebodings reported to me by my patients

And each man, in his own way and in his own time, tried to catch up on all that he had missed, though in some ways you can never catch up. There will always be that tune everyone knows but you, or the memory of a child's first steps, or that word she repeated endlessly when she first began to talk. When you have been away from everything familiar for a year, some things are irretrievable.