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The Jacor story was all about seeing micro opportunities in macro events. I find implications for opportunities everywhere: in world events, economic news, and conversations. I’ve always been on the lookout for big-picture influencers and anomalies that will direct the course of industries and companies.

At its heart, grave dancing was an opportunity to resurrect those assets deserving of a fresh start. It was a bet in my ability to affect a turnaround.

The Jewish state tried to employ the tragic memories as the certificate of its political legitimacy, as safe-conduct pass for its past and future policies, and above all as the advance payment for the injustices it might itself commit.

As strange as it sounds, this group, which eventually morphed into Hamas, was initially opposed to violent confrontations with Israel. Salvation in their pious thinking, would come about only after we all went back to the unsullied Islamic way of life.

In Palestinian tradition, the individual isn’t really an individual. If you steal something, or are gen accused of doing so, you and your entire tribe become culpable. The wronged family or tribe has the right of revenge against any member of your tribe or family. What prevents revenge and bloodshed is a form of conflict resolution - the two sides set up a Sulha.

Morally speaking, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind. Their humanism never had to face us.

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it. Power and accident are but names for ignorance of the casual chains, but the chains exit whether we feel them or not. Fortunately we do not, for if we felt their weight, we could scarcely act at all.

I believe that it would be worth trying to learn something about the world even if in trying to do so we should merely learn that we do not know much . . . It might be well for all of us to remember that, while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
Popper - Conjectures and Refutations (1963)

The only rational policy, in all three cases, is to judge institutions, plans and ways of life according to how good they are at correcting mistakes: removing bad policies and leaders, superseding bad explanations, and recovering from disasters.

In Israel, the country with the world’s most proportional electoral system, which has sacrificed all other considerations in favour of the supposed fairness of proportionality – even proportionality itself is not always achieved: in the election of 1992, the right-wing parties as a whole received a majority of the popular vote, but the left-wing ones had a majority of the seats.

She had brought home from school a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. She cried and cried in anguished identification with this Jewish child hidden in an annex, terrified at being found out by the killers of her people. It was a paradoxical identification for the daughter of a mother who had suffered so much at the hands of the Zionist.

Certainly you can’t derive an ought from an is, but you can’t derive a factual theory from an is either. That is not what science does. The growth of knowledge does not consist of finding ways to justify one’s beliefs. It consists of finding good explanations. And, although factual evidence and moral maxims are logically independent, factual and moral explanations are not.

For the mathematician, the proof of these theorems is part of the free exercise of his natural reasoning capacity.

The greatest of these is the open war that is being fought between two systems of ideas which return different and conflicting answers to what has been the central question of politics - the question of obedience and coercion.

To demand a unity of method in philosophy, and reject whatever the method cannot successfully manage - is merely to allow oneself to remain at the mercy of primitive and uncriticized political beliefs.

Action is choice; choice is free commitment to this or that way of behaving, living, and so on; the possibilities are never fewer than two: to do or not to do; be or not be.

The most important factor is the deep institutional differences between the two countries. While Brazilian institutions effectively constrain the executive from implementing irresponsible policies,Venezuelan institutions lack the required checks and balances to restrict such policies.

Repeated mistakes in exchange-rate policy will be singled out as the most important cause behind the region’s economic travails, the waning support for modernizing reforms, and the eventual revival of populism during the twenty-fi rst century.

allowing an artifi cial strengthening of the currency—or currency overvaluation—has negative economic as well as political effects. In particular, it alienates exporters, which during the early years of the reform process are the natural allies of a reformist government, and is likely to end up in a major crisis with huge unemployment costs.

Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgement of human fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic government, international organisations, and markets.

The brain’s aesthetic response may be a receptiveness to the counter-entropic patterns that can spring forth from nature.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology.

Using knowledge to cause automated physical transformations is, in itself, not unique to humans. It is the basic method by which all organisms keep themselves alive: every cell is a chemical factory.

Both oppose arrogance: the Principle of Mediocrity opposes the pre-Enlightenment arrogance of believing ourselves significant in the world; the Spaceship Earth metaphor opposes the Enlightenment arrogance of aspiring to control the world. Both have a moral element: we should not consider ourselves significant, they assert; we should not expect the world to submit indefinitely to our depredations.

North defined institutions as
“the rules of the game in a society, or more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.” Defined in this way, it is clear that institutions provide the incentives structure that governs human behavior and economic relations in a particular community.

Hence the paradox: social development creates the very forces that undermine it.

Social development creates winners and losers, new classes of rich and poor, new relations between men and women and old and young. It even creates whole new cores when the advantages of backwardness empower those who had previously been marginal. Its growth depends on societies becoming larger, more complicated, and harder to manage; the higher it rises, the more threats to itself it creates.

He contrasted the crudeness of the United Sates, where everything—even the arts and the sciences—had to have a practical application, with the values of ancient Greece. He went on to argue that a mechanical application of democratic principles—which he associated with Benjamin Franklin—resulted in crass materialism and encouragement of a mediocre, lowbrow culture.

Sometimes progress and technological advances result in the collapse of old ways of life and the disappearance of older technologies. Th
is is what Schumpeter called “creative
destruction.

most of the money-making activity would contain profoundly antisocial effects. This would be so because the activity would exacerbate the current, harmful trend in whichever more of the nations ethical young brainpower is attracted into lucrative money management and its attendant modern frictions, as distinguished from work providing much more value to others.