Textbooks in economics, which explain the economic purpose of money (a unit of account, a store of value, and a means of exchange), usually neglect to mention the chief role of money in America: a sou...
Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know, said
My biggest concern is the misuse of science to support policies.
Microsoft had made it clear that the only way to preserve your station in Valley life was to create a monopoly. If you created a monopoly, you were at least partially exempt from the ordinary rapid cy...
Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling.
I’m now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone without breaking the law is to call someone he doesn’t know and try to sell that person something he doesn’t want.
Isocrates: Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as...
He wondered, often, what it would look like if and when the shit in question hit the fan: The stock market at bottom was rigged. The icon of global capitalism was a fraud. How would enterprising polit...
He walked around the Las Vegas casino incredulous at the spectacle before him: seven thousand people, all of whom seemed delighted with the world as they found it. A society with deep, troubling econo...
He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.
Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength.
Clark liked to say that human beings, when they took risks, fell into one of two types, pigs or chickens. The difference between these two kinds of people, he’d say, is the difference between the pig...
Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.
Amos was not merely an optimist. He himself to be an optimist because he had decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. On...
A Home without Equity Is Just a Rental with Debt,
A tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures...
Rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine
Market leader in interest rate swaps. There was a natural role for a blue-chip corporation with the highest credit rating to stand in the middle of swaps and long-term options and the other risk-spawn...
You want loyalty, hire a cocker spaniel.
When something becomes obvious to you, he said, you immediately think surely someone else is doing this.