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“one can imagine a leader who has a changing willingness to suffer a cost over time, increasing as the conflict proceeds and his resolve toughens. His motto would be: “We fight on so that our boys shall not have died in vain.” This mindset, known as loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
“How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.”
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
“A major reason wars declined in number was that the units that could fight each other declined in number. Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank from five hundred around the time of the Thirty Years’ War to fewer than thirty in the 1950s.99 Now, you might think that this makes the decline in the frequency of wars just an accounting trick. With the stroke of an eraser, diplomats remove a line on a map that separates warring parties and magically take their conflict out of the “interstate war” books and hide it in the “civil war” books. But in fact the reduction is real.”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Paul’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Paul’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
444 books
|
84 friends
113 books
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39 friends
16 books
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54 friends
40 books
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18 friends
18 books
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31 friends
169 books
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113 friends
7 books
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48 friends
127 books
|
70 friends
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