Mia

“We could fix the manufactured scarcities of our immigration system and make it easier for the world’s most brilliant people—who often graduate from American schools—to stay and work in the US. We could increase federal research and development spending rather than allow it to decline as a share of the economy, as we did for much of the second half of the twentieth century. But perhaps most important, we could fix the incentives of the American innovation system to help each dollar of funding find the right scientist taking the right risk at the right time.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Whether government is bigger or smaller is the wrong question. What it needs to be is better. It needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“We are used to understanding the battle lines of American politics as cleaving liberals who believe in a strong, active government from conservatives who doubt it. The truth is far more complicated. Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do. Conservatives talk as if they want a small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power. Both sides are attached to a rhetoric of government that is routinely betrayed by their actions. The big government–small government divide is often more a matter of sentiment than substance.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance