I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.
When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.
In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.
I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.
Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.
Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.
The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.