Alistair

“The only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Happiness is not good for the economy.
We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Depicting rational economic man as an isolated individual – unaffected by the choices of others – proved highly convenient for modelling the economy, but it was long questioned even from within the discipline. At the end of the nineteenth century, the sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen berated economic theory for depicting man as a ‘self-contained globule of desire’, while the French polymath Henri Poincaré pointed out that it overlooked ‘people’s tendency to act like sheep’.31 He was right: we are not so different from herds as we might like to imagine. We follow social norms, typically preferring to do what we expect others will do and, especially if filled with fear or doubt, we tend to go with the crowd. One”
― Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

“Pride…it’s so often an excuse for people to be weak.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside