The Optimist's Telescope Quotes

“In the late eighteenth century, Napoleon’s government offered a 12,000-franc prize to anyone who could invent a way to preserve food for military troops traveling across barren lands, which yielded the techniques of modern food canning.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“In 1714, Isaac Newton and the British Crown put up the Longitude Prize—a challenge to improve naval navigation with a prize purse of £20,000.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“Nobel Prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom pointed out that Hardin was actually quite late to the party of thinkers who came up with this idea. Aristotle wrote in his treatise on politics, “What is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“Fisheries have long been seen as classic exemplars of the “tragedy of the commons.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“Other reports have documented how “teaching to the test” curtails student curiosity, and how it has even driven some teachers and principals to cheat by correcting student answers.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“Meeting their numeric targets, however, is not the same as fulfilling their actual goals. Thousands of people might get trained as farmers or software programmers, but perhaps only a few stay in their new jobs. Hundreds of meals can be served in a neighborhood without ever addressing the reasons people are hungry. Profits can be earned while a company heads toward a blowup, and tests can be passed by students who learn little of use for their lives. More people can be put in jail as crime and violence in a city rise.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“When conflicts arise, which they inevitably do, mediation happens at a “peace” table or corner, where a child holds an object such as a stone when talking, and passes it over to the other child when listening. The tools build in a slow rhythm for pacing a conversation that is prone to breaking out into an argument.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“Hal Gregersen, the executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, confirmed my suspicions with actual research. In interviews with five hundred well-established entrepreneurs and inventors, he found that about a third attributed their innovative ability to the early support of either Montessori teachers, or teachers in what Gregersen deemed Montessori-like schools.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“I later learned that the far-thinking founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, had all studied in Montessori schools.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“Most schools, Montessori observed, immobilized students “like butterflies mounted on pins” and attempted to motivate them with prizes and punishments instead of their own interests. In the early 1900s, Montessori left medicine to begin forging her educational philosophy.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“What I find clever about prize-linked savings programs is that they wed people’s immediate temptation to gamble with their long-run aspirations to save. The underlying idea is that we can motivate ourselves in the present to do something that is good for ourselves in the future. This seems to me the flip side of setting near-term targets—instead, it’s finding ways to lure ourselves to stay on the long course.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“One survey of Americans shows that 38 percent of those in low-income brackets—and 21 percent of Americans overall—feel winning the lottery is the most practical way to accumulate a large sum of money.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“When you don’t see catastrophe coming, you can’t be called reckless. That’s just misfortune.”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

“That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy. —HOMER SIMPSON”
― Bina Venkataraman, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age