Rick

“Even if we accept that we are prone to errors in judgment, how do we know when to dig deeper? When might our own views not be built on stable foundations? Fortunately, there are a number of ways. Avid readers and learners, especially those who study across various fields, will tell you that they read diverse topics so they can connect patterns across disciplines or industries. From this practice, they train their brain to recognize opportunity, seeing what worked in one place and applying it elsewhere. By doing so, these people force themselves to break out of the walls that could trap them and to remain open to possibility.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“Ormerod examined the performance of democratic governments on those issues that perennially engaged their ambitions: what I have called their claims to competence. Take unemployment as an obvious example. Every contemporary government has claimed the ability to reduce unemployment. The architects of the stimulus bill passed in 2009 claimed that it would save or create 3.5 million jobs and significantly lower the unemployment rate. It would do so by spending a lot of money. Of necessity, that has been the chosen economic tool of government. Since World War II, Ormerod notes, governments have absorbed a much larger chunk of the national output in pursuit of worthy goals such as full employment. In Britain, where excellent statistics have been kept from the Victorian era onward, the size of the public sector as a proportion of the economy has doubled since 1946, compared to the period 1870–1938. Yet the difference in the average unemployment rate before and after the expansion of government was statistically negligible. A”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Deep thinking and learning is also taxing on our energy stores, and so we require simplification and reinforcement. Our minds, through repetition or emotion, learn things and then, having committed them to memory, rely on this information and often never question it again; we put our energy into other things we deem more important. Like building a structure with a strong base, we make our mental models the foundation for adding newer information. We notice things that match our view and we dismiss things that do not. As we build our narrow knowledge on top of that foundation, we might not even realize when the foundation itself is weak. And so, as we go on with our lives, filtering a massive amount of information, we can easily become blind to important information, caught in our own bubbles, disregarding some information or alternative views, even when it might be helpful to us. Our decisions are shaped by what we regard as the facts, and if new information emerges that belies what we believe, it often hardens us to our original view.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“The seemingly random events of Brexit, Trump, and a rise in populism and hate in our world are not haphazard or isolated at all. They are all connected to a loss in hope for a better future for large portions of the population. Underlying this loss of hope is a new economic reality where it’s not just the poor who are missing out on economic gains. Much of the middle class is also feeling squeezed. Instead of technology allowing for a fifteen-hour work week, as Keynes predicted when he penned his 1930s essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” vast numbers of people are working longer, in jobs they rightly fear will soon be gone. Trapped—wondering how they will provide for their families and basic needs when the other shoe drops. At the same time, we are seeing a massive rise in inequality: in the United States, the top 5 percent of the population now holds more than two-thirds of the wealth, while the remaining 95 percent of the population fights for their share of the other third.1 Just three people—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—account for more wealth than 50 percent of the population.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future