A Bigger Prize Quotes

“Over 100 years of research into productivity has shown that, after about forty hours a week, when we work longer, we make more mistakes – and the extra time goes to cleaning them up, the mess we made. ‘We see it here in England and in the”
― Margaret Heffernan, A Bigger Prize: When No One Wins Unless Everyone Wins

“But even if, as Johnson argues, power and dominance serve no meaningful purpose, they always incur costs. In biology, the cost can be painfully visible. During courtship, the argus cock pheasant spreads his large secondary wing feathers, which are decorated with beautiful eye spots; the bigger they are, the more they stimulate the female. And the longer the feathers, the more progeny the cock will produce. So the more beautiful cocks produce more descendants. That should be a competitive advantage. But the evolution of the argus pheasant has run itself into a blind alley because the most gorgeous cock has feathers so huge and unwieldy that they may cause him to be eaten by a predator, because he can’t fly away fast enough. Oskar Heinroth, the teacher of Konrad Lorenz, commented: ‘Next to the wings of the argus pheasant, the hectic life of western civilized man is the most stupid product of intra-specific selection!”
― Margaret Heffernan, A Bigger Prize: When No One Wins Unless Everyone Wins