Vysloczil

“Preindustrial living standards are predictable based on knowledge of disease and environment. Differences in social energy across societies were muted by the Malthusian constraints. They had minimal impacts on living conditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, we have entered a strange new world in which economic theory is of little use in understanding differences in income across societies, or the future income in any specific society. Wealth and poverty are a matter of differences in local social interactions that are magnified, not dampened, by the economic system, to produce feast or famine.”
― Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

“In Battuta's obsession with sharia and the Muslim world and in his lack of interest in nearly everything outside it we clearly see the double-edged sword of Islam so visible in today's world: an ecumenical but self-satisfied faith capable of uniting far-flung peoples under one system of belief and one regime of law, but also severely limited in its capacity to examine and borrow from others.”
― William J Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow