Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don’t take the unskilled seriously.

They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.

Things always become obvious after the fact

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we’re building bigger and bigger ships. So these...

In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation’s funeral at our expense.

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

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...

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to...

Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health

Corporations take the humanity out of trade – they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.

All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn’t get anything right.

The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

I don’t read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when...

Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click ‘I agree’ but you don’t know what you’re agreeing to.

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person...

Love without sacrifice is like theft

The key to wealth is that it doesn’t matter. Once you’ve had it, you don’t think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.

Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not...

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.