Simone Barbera

“When the Church banned marriage to in-laws, classifying them as “siblings” to make such unions incestuous, the bonds between kin-groups were broken by the death of either spouse, since the surviving wife or husband was prohibited from incestuously marrying any of their affines.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“Finally, is it fair that the pollution caused, in China for example, by the production of goods exported to the United States and Europe be counted as Chinese pollution, and be covered by the system of permits to which all countries, including China, would be subject? The answer is that Chinese firms that emit GHGs when they produce exported goods will pass the price of carbon through to American and European importers so that rich country consumers will pay for the pollution their consumption induces. International trade does not alter the principle that payment should be collected where emissions are produced.”
― Jean Tirole, Economics for the Common Good

“The difference between Victorian liberals and Soviet Communists should now be clear. Nature, in the form of a new pathogen, played a much larger role in the Irish Famine. The Ukrainian Holodomor, by contrast, was largely man-made and with malice aforethought.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

“we compared a sampling of successful and unsuccessful fairy tales in the famous Brothers Grimm collection. Successful (widely known) fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, had just two or three counterintuitive violations. Unsuccessful ones (have you heard of the Donkey Lettuce?) had none, or in other cases, quite the opposite—they had far too many violations. Successful counterintuitive representations and stories were also likely to generate emotional responses, like fear, and encouraged additional inferences.25 These kinds of memory biases play an important role in religious belief.26 The extraordinary agents endemic to religions appear to possess a particularly evocative set of abilities not shared by ordinary beings. They can be invisible; they can see things from afar; they can move through physical objects. This minimal counterintuitiveness is memorable, giving these concepts an advantage in cultural transmission. These departures from common sense are systematic but not radical enough to rupture meaning completely. As Sperber has put it, these minimal counterintuitions are relevant mysteries: they are closely connected to background knowledge, but do not admit to a final interpretation.”
― Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict