“The university’s retreat from public benefits damaged their independence as institutions. It damaged their intellectual ability to see over the horizon to the next economy and society and not just adapt to the current one. The retreat damaged their financial solvency, as it undermined the case for public good provision on which public universities depended to offer high-quality education on a mass scale. The public university could not be heard arguing that it absolutely had to offer mass quality. What good were the educated masses in a tech age when all the valuable workers could fit onto the Google bus?”
― The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them
― The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them
“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If it’s a duck, it’s likely to swim, fly, have a back off which water rolls, and contain meat that’s tasty when wrapped in a pancake with scallions and hoisin sauce.”
― The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
― The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
“By eschewing shared belonging, and the benign patriotism that it can support, liberals have abandoned the only force capable of uniting our societies behind remedies. Inadvertently, recklessly, they have handed it to the charlatan extremes, which are gleefully twisting it to their own warped purposes.”
― The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
― The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
“When considering automation, therefore, it is wrong to compare the abilities of a single human driver to that of a single self-driving car, or of a single human doctor to that of a single AI doctor. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.”
― 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
― 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
“In most cases the correct explanation will invoke a complex interaction between heredity and environment: culture is crucial, but culture could not exist without mental faculties that allow humans to create and learn culture to begin with. My goal in this book is not to argue that genes are everything and culture is nothing—no one believes that—but to explore why the extreme position (that culture is everything) is so often seen as moderate, and the moderate position is seen as extreme.”
― The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
― The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Max’s 2025 Year in Books
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