Yogi Berra

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pages: 376 words: 91,192

Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations by Garson O'Toole

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, en.wikipedia.org, Honoré de Balzac, Internet Archive, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, ought to be enough for anybody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Steve Jobs, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra

In January 1961 the columnist Earl Wilson indicated that the jest was still being used by comedians such as Ukie Sherin.12 Appearing at the Losers Club in Hollywood, Ukie said, “No wonder nobody ever comes in here—it’s too crowded.” In April 1962 the Cleveland Plain Dealer assigned the joke to Yogi Berra.13 A Yogi Berraism: At Ft. Lauderdale Yogi was listening to his teammates talk about a restaurant in the area. Said Yogi, “Aw, nobody ever goes there. It’s too crowded.” In 1963 the gag was ascribed to Berra again, but a detail of the story was changed—the restaurant was in New York instead of Fort Lauderdale.14 New York Yankee coach Jim Hegan attributes this story to Yogi Berra, the new resident genius of the Bombers. Berra was asked if a certain restaurant in New York was as popular as ever.

The comedians Rags Ragland and Ukie Sherin employed the quip, as did the writer John McNulty. In addition, there is some evidence that Yogi Berra employed the joke; however, in all documented cases, the jest was already in circulation. Notes: In memoriam: thanks to my brother Stephen, who greatly enjoyed Yogi-isms. 1. Steve Marcus, “Color Yogi a Happy Guy; Now Wearing Astros’ Rainbow Uniform, Berra’s Relaxed, Popular,” Newsday (Long Island, NY), February 24, 1986, sports section, 92. Accessed in ProQuest. 2. William Safire, “Mr. Bonaprop,” On Language, New York Times, February 15, 1987, A8. Accessed in ProQuest. 3. Yogi Berra, The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said!

The quotation is then reassigned to the prominent individual. In essence, the remark is reused and captured. This shift in attribution can occur even when the well-known person strives mightily to prevent it by carefully giving proper credit. HOST Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker, and Yogi Berra are quotation superstars. Personas of this type are so vibrant and attractive that they become hosts for quotations they never uttered. A remark formulated by a lesser-known figure is attached to a famous host. The relationship is symbiotic and often enhances the popularity of both the host and the quotation.


Comedy Writing Secrets by Mel Helitzer, Mark Shatz

Albert Einstein, built by the lowest bidder, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, elephant in my pajamas, fake news, fear of failure, index card, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, Yogi Berra

A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named William. Include me out. Baseball managers Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra were credited with malaprops that helped to cemented their immortality in reference books. You wouldn't have won if we had. —Yogi Berra 70 Comedy Writing Secrets If people don't want to come to the ballpark, nobody can stop them. —Casey Stengel Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical. —Yogi Berra That restaurant is so popular, nobody goes there anymore. —Yogi Berra Humorists bless politicians who make their jobs easy by fracturing the English language, as did former Vice President Dan Quayle.

Even if the speech is on a serious topic—politics, the economy, business, or education—a humorous twist in the title will increase interest and attendance. For example, there's nothing more important than sales training speeches, but astute sales managers have learned to avoid making them deadly with titles like these. Yogi Berra Was Right—It Ain't Over 'til It's Over As Alexander Bell Said: "What D'ya Mean My Three Minutes Are Up?" Caterpillars and Other Special People What They Never Dared Tell You About... Writing Humor for Speeches 201 SHOWTIME List topics that you are qualified to speak about, and for each topic, write three to five titles with a humorous twist.


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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, financial engineering, fixed income, global village, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, power law, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, Yogi Berra

For the uncertain future has yet to come, with all variety of future; and him only to whom the divinity has [guaranteed] continued happiness until the end we may call happy.” The modern equivalent has been no less eloquently voiced by the baseball coach Yogi Berra, who seems to have translated Solon’s outburst from the pure Attic Greek into no less pure Brooklyn English with “it ain’t over until it’s over,” or, in a less dignified manner, with “it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.” In addition, aside from his use of the vernacular, the Yogi Berra quote presents an advantage of being true, while the meeting between Croesus and Solon was one of those historical facts that benefited from the imagination of the chroniclers, as it was chronologically impossible for the two men to have been in the same location.

To such a journalistic and well-sounding (but senseless) argument, Shiller was unable to respond except to explain that the fact that he was wrong in one single market call should not carry undue significance. Shiller, as a scientist, did not claim to be a prophet or one of the entertainers who comment on the markets on the evening news. Yogi Berra would have had a better time with his confident comment on the fat lady not having sung yet. I could not understand what Shiller, untrained to compress his ideas into vapid sound bites, was doing on such a TV show. Clearly, it is foolish to think that an irrational market cannot become even more irrational; Shiller’s views on the rationality of the market are not invalidated by the argument that he was wrong in the past.

Because we will never know if all the swans are white (Popper borrowed the Kantian idea of the flaws in our mechanisms of perception). The testing mechanism may be faulty. However, the statement that there is a black swan is possible to make. A theory cannot be verified. To paraphrase baseball coach Yogi Berra again, past data has a lot of good in it, but it is the bad side that is bad. It can only be provisionally accepted. A theory that falls outside of these two categories is not a theory. A theory that does not present a set of conditions under which it would be considered wrong would be termed charlatanism—it-would be impossible to reject otherwise.


pages: 726 words: 172,988

The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It by Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Wall, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, open economy, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, Yogi Berra

In a manner similar to that seen in the physical principle that energy is conserved in a closed system, as long as the risks of the investments are col-lectively borne by the investors who provide the funding, changing how the risks are divided among them will not by itself change the overall funding costs. Think about the total returns of the corporation as a pie and the funding mix as a way of cutting the pie into different pieces. Baseball legend Yogi Berra is said to have once asked a waiter to cut his pizza into four slices, saying, “I am not hungry enough for eight today.”19 This is funny because we know that changing the way in which a pizza is cut does not affect its food content. Similarly, the way in which the funding mix divides the risks and returns among debt and equity investors does not by itself affect the value of the firm or its funding costs.

If, for example, some of the pizza stuck to the knife and was lost every time the pie was cut, an eight-slice pie might in fact have had less food content than a four-slice pie. (If instead the knife had had a special device for adding cheese in the process of cutting, the pie would have had more substance when it was cut into eight pieces, so Yogi Berra would indeed have needed to be hungrier to eat an eight-slice pie than to eat a four-slice pie.) Similarly, if the mix of debt and equity funding affects the value and the funding costs of a corporation, the reasons must be related to how the size of the total “pie” available to investors is affected rather than to how the pie is divided among them.

As we will see in the next chapter, guarantees and subsidies play a critical role in answering this question. NINE Sweet Subsidies I don’t know how you measure that subsidy.… That’s why they say it’s invaluable. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, part of the credit rating agency Moody’s, April 2009 YOGI BERRA’S SUGGESTION that the content of a pizza might depend on how it is cut is absurd. Yet when banks borrow excessively and economize on equity, the total “pie” available to their investors grows.1 When banks borrow, they benefit from subsidies that they would not enjoy if they relied more on equity.


pages: 162 words: 50,108

The Little Book of Hedge Funds by Anthony Scaramucci

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business process, carried interest, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, follow your passion, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, managed futures, margin call, mass immigration, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Bethany McLean, “Everybody’s Going Hedge Funds,” Fortune, June 8, 1998, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/06/08/243511/. 2. Steve Fishman, “Get Richest Quickest,” New York Magazine, May 21, 2005. 3. Michael Steinhardt, No Bull: My Life In and Out of Markets (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001). Conclusion The Shape of Things to Come The obvious isn’t obvious until it’s obvious. —Should have come from Yogi Berra but it is really from Anthony Scaramucci THE HEDGE FUND INDUSTRY doesn’t climb a wall of worry; it climbs a wall of resentment and scorn. For two decades now, people have sought to demystify the mysterious nature of hedge funds. They have asserted that the business does not add any value, awards extreme risk takers, charges ostentatiously high fees, and renders the market unsettled and unstable.

Yet, in my humble opinion, the hedge fund industry will continue to grow, albeit in traditional and even unorthodox ways. Legendary managers, like Dave Tepper from Appaloosa, have given back money choosing to run their own and less of other peoples. It is quite possible that this strategy will be a trend for the future. As Yogi Berra did say, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” After all, no one can really predict it with any certainty. Yet, there are a few things that will always be certain . . . many of which I urge you to take away with you: 1. Have Passion: Don’t be in the hedge fund industry just for money; be a part of it because you have a passion for money management. 2.


pages: 125 words: 15,690

Getting Organized at Work: 24 Lessons to Set Goals, Establish Priorities, and Managing Your Time by Kenneth Zeigler

Yogi Berra

If you are the one assigning the project, make sure you tell your direct report or reports exactly when you expect the project to be completed. This will help them prioritize your request and eliminate confusion. “You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” —Yogi Berra 15 ፬ Just be optimistic ፬ ឡThink realistically What’s the number one reason why people don’t complete their projects on time? It’s because they haven’t left any room for anything to go wrong, such as interruptions or unexpected problems. That’s why it’s so important to try to anticipate potential obstacles or changes from the start or at least before they occur.


pages: 261 words: 72,277

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger

Apollo 11, assortative mating, barriers to entry, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, double helix, driverless car, fixed-gear, flying shuttle, Google Glasses, job satisfaction, messenger bag, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, spinning jenny, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies, white flight, Yogi Berra

Ice cream and monkey brains . . . How to be a better negotiator . . . Explaining blockbusters . . . Why copycats get bigger tips . . . Avoiding groupthink 2. A Horse of a Different Color Why successful athletes have older siblings . . . The drive for distinction . . . How ordering with others can ruin your meal . . . Yogi Berra was right . . . Independence with a side of cranberry sauce . . . Why other peoples’ kids look the same but yours are completely unique . . . Why Sports Illustrated sells similarity while Vogue deals in difference 3. Not If They’re Doing It Why companies send celebrities free gifts—from their competitors . . .

Baseball didn’t used to pay as much, so players had to put down the bat and glove during the off-season and find other ways to support their families. Hall of Famer Casey Stengel drove taxicabs. Pitcher Walter Johnson dug postholes for a telephone company. Shortstop Phil Rizzuto worked at a clothing store. Yogi Berra had a job as a greeter and headwaiter at Ruggeri’s, one of the best-known Italian restaurants in St. Louis. Even after he led the Yankees to win the World Series in the 1950s, Berra would don a tuxedo and greet patrons as they entered the restaurant in the off-season. As salaries increased, players spent more of the off-season on baseball and less on their other pursuits.


pages: 219 words: 15,438

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham

book value, business logic, buy and hold, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, corporate governance, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, fixed income, George Santayana, Henry Singleton, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, junk bonds, large denomination, low cost airline, Michael Milken, oil shock, passive investing, price stability, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Teledyne, the market place, transaction costs, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

About three million shares were accepted when we tendered our holdings to KKR, which acquired RJR, and the returned 1997] THE ESSAYS OF WARREN BUFFETT 71 shares were promptly sold in the market. Our pre-tax profit was a better-than-expected $64 million. Earlier, another familiar face turned up in the RJR bidding contest: Jay Pritzker, who was part of a First Boston group that made a tax-oriented offer. To quote Yogi Berra; "It was déjà vu all over again." During most of the time when we normally would have been purchasers of RJR, our activities in the stock were restricted because of Salomon's participation in a bidding group. Customarily, Charlie and I, though we are directors of Salomon, are walled off from information about its merger and acquisition work.

The first choice of these managers in making acquisitions may be to use cash or debt. But frequently the CEO's cravings outpace cash and credit resources (certainly mine always have). Frequently, also, these cravings occur when his own stock is selling far below intrinsic business value. This state of affairs produces a moment of truth. At that point, as Yogi Berra has said, "You can observe a lot just by watching." For shareholders then will find which objective the management truly prefers-expansion of domain or maintenance of owners' wealth. The need to choose between these objectives occurs for some simple reasons. Companies often sell in the stock market below their intrinsic business value.


pages: 288 words: 81,253

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

People watching One could conceivably argue that maybe self-serving bias isn’t such a big deal because we can learn from other people’s experience. Maybe the solution that has evolved is to compensate for the obstacles in learning from our own experience by watching other people do stuff. There are more than seven billion other people on the planet who do stuff all the time. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot by watching.” Watching is an established learning method. There is an entire industry devoted to collecting other people’s outcomes. When you read the Harvard Business Review or any kind of business or management case study, you’re trying to learn from others. An important element of medical education is watching doctors perform medical procedures or other caregivers do their jobs up close.

There are several versions of transcripts and videos of the Iowa Republican presidential primary debate on January 28, 2016, such as Team Fix, “7th Republican Debate Transcript, Annotated: Who Said What and What It Meant,” Washington Post, January 28, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/28/7th-republican-debate-transcript-annotated-who-said-what-and-what-it-meant. People watching: Yogi Berra has proven a fertile source for quotes on such a variety of subjects that it’s reasonable to wonder whether he actually said all the things attributed to him. Because he wrote a book using this astute observation as its title, I feel I’m on safe ground considering this an actual quote, or at least one Berra adopted as his own.


pages: 277 words: 91,698

SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build by Jonathan Waldman

Burning Man, computer vision, Ford paid five dollars a day, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Hyperloop, industrial robot, information security, James Webb Space Telescope, job automation, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, off grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing, Yogi Berra

He died in 1992 and has been mostly forgotten. Schoolkids read John Steinbeck, not Pietro di Donato. Even the world’s fastest bricklayer, a title bestowed annually, isn’t famous. Can you bring up his name? Other bricklayers merely begat fame. The father of Yankees manager Joe Girardi was a bricklayer. So was the father of Yankees catcher Yogi Berra. Berra’s father, who helped build the arena in St. Louis, did not like that his son got dirty for no better purpose than playing ball. This, of course, was a very Berra-ish opinion, since what was the point of the arena? It was in the house of a master bricklayer that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but does anyone remember the bricklayer’s name?

Therein lay the cruel technological fate that ever after afflicted bricklayers: As buildings got bigger and taller, roofers, electricians, plumbers, ironworkers, glaziers, carpenters, painters, and ventilation guys all gained work, even while the roofs, wires, pipes, beams, windows, and ducts they wrangled evolved. But masons—whose bricks and mortar remained nearly unchanged—lost out. Masonry went from fundamental—from essential—to just a veneer. By 1895, the amount of brickwork available had shrunk 80 percent. As Yogi Berra later put it: The future wasn’t what it used to be. In response to this sudden change, bricklayers at first held up their chins. Bricklayers in New York tried the Kahn system, hated it, and left it to laborers. They handed work to the American Brotherhood of Cement Workers, adamant that they would not work on buildings where concrete was used in place of masonry.


pages: 139 words: 33,246

Money Moments: Simple Steps to Financial Well-Being by Jason Butler

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, happiness index / gross national happiness, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Steve Jobs, time value of money, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

What I do know is that they did and continue to contribute to my own sense of well-being and in that sense they were worth every penny. BEING ON TRACK TO MEET YOUR FINANCIAL GOALS CREATING AND UPDATING A FINANCIAL PLAN 29 CHARTING YOUR COURSE MAKING DAILY DECISIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF LONG-TERM GOALS ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.’ Yogi Berra, American professional baseball catcher, manager and coach At 8am on 28th November 1979 Air New Zealand Flight 901 took off from Auckland International Airport with 257 people on board, destined for a sightseeing day trip to Antarctica. However, the pilots were unaware that someone at Air New Zealand’s flight control had changed the flight coordinates by two degrees.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

H. (2015). 39 Chace (2016), pp. 16–17. 40 Kelly (2016). 41 Avent, R. (2016) The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century, New York: St. Martin’s Press, p. 59. 42 Ford, M. (2015) The Rise of the Robots, London: Oneworld, pp. 76–8. Chapter 3 1 Simon, H. (1966) “Automation”, letter in the New York Review of Books, May 26, 1966. 2 This remark, or something very much like it, is widely attributed to a range of people including Yogi Berra (the baseball coach of the New York Yankees), Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and Sam Goldwyn (the movie mogul). 3 This statement is widely attributed to the great sage but I have found it impossible to pin down chapter and verse. 4 Strictly speaking, there should be an increase in the volume of investment, but if the price of investment goods falls sufficiently then the total value of investment spending may not rise.

“Capitalism in the Age of Robots: Work, Income, and Wealth in the Twenty-First Century,” lecture given at the School of Advanced Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, April 20, 2018. 17 Bootle, R. (2009) The Trouble with Markets: Saving Capitalism from Itself, London: Nicholas Brealey. 18 Chace (2016), pp. 217–18. 19 Lowrey, A. (2018) Give People Money: The simple idea to solve inequality and revolutionise our lives, London: WH Allen. 20 Referred to in Lowrey, A. (2018). 21 Quoted in Van Parijs and Vanderborght (2017), p. 85. 22 Ibid. 23 “The Basics of Basic Income,” www.​johnkay.​com 24 Piketty, T. (2013) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, USA: Harvard University Press. 25 Pinker, S. (2018) Enlightenment Now, London: Allen Lane. Conclusion 1 This remark is widely credited to the American baseball coach and philosopher Yogi Berra, but it or something like it is also attributed to a wide range of other people. 2 Sagan, C. (1980) Cosmos, New York: Random House. Epilogue 1 See Darrach, B., Meet Shaky, the First Electronic Person, Life, November 20, 1970, p. 68. 2 Quoted by Brockman (2015), p. 166. 3 Ford (2015), pp. 229–30. 4 Leonhard (2016), p. 9. 5 This would have a consequence of key interest not so much to economists as to our cousins, the accountants.


pages: 147 words: 37,622

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life by Jim Benson, Tonianne Demaria Barry

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Bluma Zeigarnik, corporate governance, Howard Rheingold, intangible asset, job satisfaction, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Ken Thompson, pattern recognition, performance metric, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Being able to visualize these tasks shows us the weight of their existential overhead, until finally we have to bite the bullet and process a bunch of them en masse. Use a little creativity to call attention to certain kinds of tasks that may require special attention. Sometimes a little visual reinforcement is the push to action we need. EXPERT: METRICS IN PERSONAL KANBAN You can observe a lot by just watching. ~ Yogi Berra Metrics help us gauge our progress, validate our performance, measure proximity to our goals, and show us where our actions can be improved. Progress, as we’ve seen, is relative to and a matter of context. Metrics should reflect our context, revealing the difference between expected and actual progress.


pages: 131 words: 45,778

My Misspent Youth: Essays by Meghan Daum

haute couture, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, pneumatic tube, rent control, rent stabilization, Yogi Berra

To contemplate what it means to be a flight attendant for ten or more years is to consider, after getting past the initially ludicrous notion of serving drinks at 37,000 feet, the effects of the relatively recent, popular tendency to put flying in a category that also includes walking and driving. To say that flight has become pedestrian is something of a Yogi Berra-ism. But to say that air travel has infused itself into the human experience without leaving marks or building up potentially problematic immunities is to view technology in a Pollyanna-like manner that may have gone out of fashion when applied to phenomena like the Internet and surveillance cameras but continues to thrive in the realm of travel.


pages: 165 words: 47,193

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

Investment firms, which make money by attracting the savings of earners, are busy courting Millennials.9 Wait and see: the generation that supposedly doesn’t know how to work will be the richest generation yet. CHAPTER SEVEN My Story “I have never believed in myself more than when I was writing my script. I was never happier with myself.”1 —Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then “How do you like school?” Yogi Berra replied, “Closed.”2 I’m going to pause now to share the story of my own career, not because it’s extraordinary but because it’s in fact pretty ordinary. My story illustrates how economic evolution has expanded the range of work options. When I graduated from college in 1992, there was no Internet to speak of.


pages: 428 words: 138,235

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Benchmark Capital, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

They lived in Daly City, and Dave’s pride and joy was a forty-two-foot Viking, which he had spent years restoring. Matlin found Norbert and said, “Dude, this is the save of a lifetime. We pulled it off! You pulled it off!” The membership agreement alone with Oracle Racing would come close to cutting their debt in half. Norbert shrugged and laughed. “Yogi Berra said, ‘If you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ I took it.” Madeleine watched Norbert. “This is phenomenal,” she said, giving Norbert a kiss. “Who knows what this will lead to?” That night, less than three months after Norbert sent off the first e-mail to Erkelens, it became official: the once moribund Golden Gate Yacht Club was named the official sponsor of Oracle Racing.

Larry had learned that he loved the striving, the facing of setbacks, and the trying again. It was what his friend Rafael Nadal said about savoring the fight and the winning would come. Everest, it turned out, was never more beautiful than looking up from below. PART IV “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” —Yogi Berra Oracle Team USA’s AC72. Courtesy Oracle Team USA Course map of the 34th America’s Cup. Courtesy America’s Cup Event Authority 30 San Francisco Bay Summer 2012 to Summer 2013 EARLY ON THE MORNING of August 30, 2012, Oracle Team USA’s new black catamaran was wheeled for the first time from the cool dark build shed at Pier 80 in San Francisco into the bright sunshine.


Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations by Garr Reynolds

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Hans Rosling, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Looking to improve every day is what the spirit of personal kaizen is all about. It’s not about how far you have come or how far you have yet to go. It is only about this moment, about being open to seeing the lessons around you and possessing the capacity and willingness to learn and improve. The Lessons Are All Around You The legendary Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot by just looking around.” Obvious perhaps, yet profound in its simple truth. If you want to improve, learn to see the vast number of lessons all around you. You can learn a lot by really taking the time to see and examine the visual world around you. Design is everywhere.


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

” —MARCIA K. McNUTT, president of the National Academy of Sciences “What if we got one of the smartest people alive to figure the odds on how we might be able to survive our ability to do ourselves in? We have that person in Martin Rees, and his thoughtful answers in this book.” —ALAN ALDA “As Yogi Berra said, ‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.’ But in this readable and thought-provoking book, Martin Rees shows the challenges we and our planet face—and why scientists need to engage citizens in the choices that are made.” —SHIRLEY M. MALCOM, director of education and human resources programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science “For anyone who wants to consider the choices we have in our future and the implications of those choices, this is the book to read.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Precisely what we need to do is detailed later in the book, but for now, we have to wake up to the fact that we can choose our future and collectively create it. Our collective responsibility is to ensure that a better future is not only possible but probable, and then not only probable but foreseeable. The great baseball player Yogi Berra famously said that predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. In constructing these scenarios, we are aware that making predictions about the world in thirty years’ time is to some degree an imaginative enterprise. However, everything we set out in these scenarios is predicted or expected by the best science.18 Indeed, much of what science has foretold is already happening.


pages: 160 words: 53,435

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder, Richard Todd

Atul Gawande, David Sedaris, demand response, gentleman farmer, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Soul of a New Machine, Yogi Berra

• Adjectives and adverbs suffering from exhaustion: “sustainable,” “green,” “iconic,” “incredible” and “incredibly.” The last two, like Chernobyl, should be out of service for decades to come. “Ironic” and “ironically” must be used reluctantly and not as labels for things that are merely odd. “Famously” (“As Yogi Berra famously said …”) is just a tired way of excusing a tired reference. • Phrases that once seemed fresh: “low-hanging fruit,” “tipping point,” “herding cats,” “on steroids,” “putting the toothpaste back in the tube,” “at the end of the day,” and “welcome to the world of …” (as a way of announcing the subject of a story after an anecdotal opener)


pages: 166 words: 53,103

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom Demarco

Brownian motion, delayed gratification, Frederick Winslow Taylor, interchangeable parts, knowledge worker, new economy, risk tolerance, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, The Soul of a New Machine, Yogi Berra

How much progress it makes in that direction is a matter of how inefficient it is. An efficient but not effective organization, on the other hand, is moving in the wrong direction. The more it optimizes, the more progress it makes away from its real goals. Such an organization could say of itself, in Yogi Berra’s words, “We’re lost, but we’re making good time.” Why Achieving Both Is Not Easy Let’s face it, the implicit goal in all organizations is to be both: to make effective choices about what to do and then carry those choices out efficiently. That presumption is so strongly built into organizational cultures everywhere that their executives sometimes can’t see when it isn’t happening.


Yucatan: Cancun & Cozumel by Bruce Conord, June Conord

Beryl Markham, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, feminist movement, if you build it, they will come, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Yogi Berra

Green buses that run up Calle 60 past the Hyatt stop there (30¢). Hungry night owls will find their way to La Habana Restaurant, at the corner of 59 and 62 (see below), or the Yucatecan Restaurante Caleca, at 62 and 61 off the Plaza Mayor, both open 24 hours. Adventures You can observe a lot by watching. ~ Yogi Berra n Sights The Paseo de Montejo is a wide tree-lined boulevard that begins at Calle 47 and runs north through the fine homes and mansions built in the belle époque-style by wealthy families and hacienda owners who made fortunes on the near-monopoly the Yucatán had in henequen. Some of the mansions are still private homes, but many are now used as office space.

Open 24 hours a day, this immensely popular spot serves up regional dishes and typical Mexican food in a large fan-cooled open dining area at prices that barely lighten the wallet. This is one of the few places whose atmosphere is created by people rather than pictures on the wall. $ Northern Campeche When you come to a fork in the road, take it. ~ sage advice from Yogi Berra, baseball player and manager T here are two routes south from the Yucatán into Campeche – the Fast Route and the Slow Route. As you travel either the slow or fast way, you’ll Campeche La Pigua (Malecón Miguel Aleman No. 197A). A pigua is a small crustacean similar to the shrimp, so you know this famous eatery’s specialties are from the sea.


pages: 444 words: 151,136

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

Character in the Victorian sense is obsolete; so to pick up the pieces from the financial meltdown we are choosing to embark on an orgy of fiscal stimulus, national debt accumulation, and taxation of the entrepreneurial class, which has been the locomotive of our good fortune. The book closes by venturing a look into the future, which as the great wordsmith of our time, Yogi Berra, opined, “ain’t what it used to be.” This last part begins by reminding us how reluctant concern over creeping socialism is, and how incognizant everyone from the least to the most educated are concerning the moral hazards of operating a fiat currency in conjunction with a state that is hell-bent on fiscal Introduction xxi expansion and providing entitlements.

Securities & Exchange Commission, February 2008, 1. 32. 2002 Performance and Accountability Report, Securities & Exchange Commission, p. 25, and 2007 Performance and Accountability Report, Securities & Exchange Commission, p. 37 404 NOTES 33. Roel Campos, “Mutual Fund Governance – Response to the Remand,” speech by the commissioner, June 29, 2005. Chapter 17: Elephants in the Room 1. Yogi Berra, The Yogi Book (New York: Workman Publishing, 1998), 118–119. “I just meant that times are different. Not necessarily better or worse. Just different.” 2. Martin De Vlieghere and Paul Vreymans, “Europe’s Ailing Social Model: Facts & Fairy Tales,” The Brussels Journal, March 23, 2006, www.brusselsjournal. com/node/933. 3.


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

But, of course, they did nothing to restructure either the financial system or the way the government regulates it. Nor were they supposed to. We turn to that story next. PART IV THE ROAD TO REFORM 10 IT’S BROKE, LET’S FIX IT: THE NEED FOR FINANCIAL REFORM You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there. —YOGI BERRA While they were battling to end frighteningly large interest-rate spreads, wildly high bid-ask spreads, the dramatic evaporation of credit, and other indicators of acute financial distress, officials at the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the FDIC, and elsewhere found themselves running an overworked financial Emergency Medical Services team, dispatching ambulances to one roadside after another to stop gravely wounded crash victims from bleeding to death.

The eventual reforms were substantial and thorough. Maybe we shouldn’t call them tinkering at all. Looking back at the harrowing financial collapse and many of the stunning policy responses thereto, and factoring in the public’s negative reactions to both, left reformers with an extremely long and complicated to-do list. As in the Yogi Berra quotation that opens this chapter, they didn’t quite know where to go or how to get there. I will not review the entire potential reform agenda here. That would occupy too many pages and bore you to tears. Besides, not all problems are created equal. Promising to be brief, I offer instead a guide to the highlights, starting with . . .


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Though I try to avoid generalising about gender, it is fair to say that men are less adaptable to disruptions in their work routines than women, and more liable to vent their anger politically. To anyone who doubts that, I have a flying car to sell you. Meanwhile, remind yourselves of the impact manufacturing job losses have had on Western politics. Way more than half of Trump’s voters were male. The same applies to the Brexit electorate. As the baseball legend Yogi Berra allegedly said, it is tough to make predictions – especially about the future. The economist Robert Gordon clearly wasn’t listening. His book The Rise and Fall of American Growth makes a startling forecast that did not go down well in Silicon Valley. The future is not what it used to be, he says.


pages: 207 words: 52,716

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

Albert Einstein, car-free, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, dark matter, digital divide, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hypertext link, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, jitney, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, new economy, patent troll, precautionary principle, profit maximization, Ronald Coase, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

Folk music, country music, jazz, blues, garage bands—these are the roots of our musical heritage. We must nourish the soil in which these roots grow. This, not copyright extension, is the way to enrich culture. Part 3 MAKING IT HAPPEN Chapter 9 Building the Commons Sector If you don’t know where you’re going, you probably won’t get there. —Yogi Berra y sons play a computer game called Sim City. It’s a brilliant invention that lets you design, grow, and govern your own virtual metropolis. You plunk down streets, sewers, power systems, and subways. You zone for commerce, industry, and residences. You drop in schools, hospitals, and fire stations.


pages: 239 words: 60,065

Retire Before Mom and Dad by Rob Berger

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, car-free, cuban missile crisis, discovery of DNA, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, hedonic treadmill, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, robo advisor, The 4% rule, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

” * * * 1 According to Northwestern Mutual, the average amount of personal debt (excluding a mortgage) was $38,000 in 2018. https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-2018 2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuabecker/2018/11/27/why-we-buy-more-than-we-need/ Chapter 2 The Game Plan “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” – Yogi Berra You’ve taken the red pill. Congratulations! Welcome to a community of people I call the Freedom Fighters. Who are the Freedom Fighters? We are a growing group of people, young and old, who believe that the best thing money can buy is Financial Freedom. In the following pages, I’ll be your guide as you begin your journey.


pages: 192 words: 63,813

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

If we contemplate travel to the nearest stars and their planetary systems, we 26 · THE END OF ASTRONAUTS must leap upward by another large f­ actor: their distances from us are about 40,000 times greater than Jupiter’s. It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the ­f uture (a remark often attributed to the g­ reat Danish physicist Niels Bohr, or, alternatively, to Yogi Berra).4 If we have learned anything from history, it is that we should continue to expect the unexpected. Some ­f uture events ­w ill occur with near certainty: the sun ­w ill rise tomorrow, and it ­will undergo a total eclipse on August 2, 2027.5 We can have a high degree of confidence in the likelihood of o ­ thers ­because of our past experience.


pages: 261 words: 70,584

Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy by Gregory Brandon Salsbury

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, buy and hold, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, hindsight bias, housing crisis, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mass affluent, Maui Hawaii, mental accounting, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, National Debt Clock, negative equity, new economy, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, Yogi Berra

A desire to leave something to your family or to a charity can be compromised by tax considerations as well. A major key to an enjoyable retirement is consistent income that pays for the things that are important to you. First step: Develop an income strategy. Develop an Income Strategy As Yogi Berra said, “When you come to the fork in the road, take it.” And as you rethink the complexity of retirement, you may be asking yourself, “I’ve come to the fork in the road. I’ve taken it. Where do I go from here?” Before you take a step in any direction, develop an income strategy. The questionnaire in Figure 8.2 identifies key areas that are specific to your needs and can help you anticipate and calculate retirement expenses.


pages: 295 words: 66,824

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

Brian Arthur, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute and Stanford University, has long used an essentially identical scenario to describe the predicament of bar patrons deciding whether or not to go to a popular bar, the experience being pleasant only if the bar is not thronged. An equilibrium naturally develops whereby the bar rarely becomes too full. (This almost seems like a belated scientific justification for Yogi Berra’s quip about Toots Shor’s restaurant in New York: “Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.”) Arthur proposed the model to clarify the behavior of market investors who, like my students and the bar patrons, must anticipate others’ anticipations of them (and so on). Whether one buys or sells, crosses the box or doesn’t cross, goes to the bar or doesn’t go, depends upon one’s beliefs about others’ possible actions and beliefs.


pages: 250 words: 64,011

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day by John H. Johnson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, Black Swan, business intelligence, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, obamacare, p-value, PageRank, pattern recognition, publication bias, QR code, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, statistical model, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons, Yogi Berra

It’s hard for people to reconcile that we’re living in an unpredictable world. A lot of people can’t get their head around that, and want to think life is going to be normal every day. But we can’t mitigate every possible risk. We have to make the best judgments we can.” In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” 9 It’s a Jungle Out There Putting It All Together Imagine going to the zoo and seeing a lion. In the next cage over, there’s an elephant. Another exhibit holds the giraffes. And so on. Each animal is in its own contained area, with a nice little sign that tells you more about it.


The Intelligent Asset Allocator: How to Build Your Portfolio to Maximize Returns and Minimize Risk by William J. Bernstein

asset allocation, backtesting, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, correlation coefficient, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, p-value, passive investing, prediction markets, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, the scientific method, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Identify the era’s conventional wisdom and then ignore it. Now look at the individual plots in Figure 4-6. Picking the worst of the stock and bond lines in each era (S&P and bond in the earlier period, EAFE and bond in the later period) would have produced poor returns, and the best stock and bond line excellent returns. The trouble, as Yogi Berra once said, is that it’s very difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future. If you take your uncle’s advice and split the difference, you find that you do reasonably well in both eras. In both cases the return of the 50/50 line is much closer to the best-performing asset line than the worst-performing asset line.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

Not as strong, but still in control. I don’t see them going away. Why? Because in a Long Tail universe, the cost to crawl up the tail to the rat’s ass is more expensive than the production. Which means only the people with the money can make the investment, which brings you back to the moguls.” It’s the Yogi Berra problem—no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded. You gotta spend as much on promotion as you do on production to attract folks to your pipe, virtual or otherwise. Mark Cuban might be right. Moguls will still roam the earth even after the asteroid hits. But they won’t be like the moguls of today.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Because the point of this book is the proposition that we ought to take decisive steps to avert falling behind China, it’s natural for readers to want me to project exactly when China will overtake us under current policies. Once upon a time, I thought this would be a straightforward thing to look up with Google. But it turns out that if you try it, you get a range of different answers. In part that’s because, as either Niels Bohr or Yogi Berra or both once quipped, predictions are hard, especially about the future. But in part it’s because the predictors are to an extent talking about different things. That’s why one Bloomberg headline from 2018 argued that China had already become the world’s biggest economy and urged Americans to “get used to it”* while one three months later argued that “extrapolating when the world’s second-biggest economy will overtake the first is a tricky business riddled with caveats” and it would perhaps never happen.* I don’t particularly want to take a side in this international economic statistics nerd fight, but it’s also a bad idea to just throw up our hands and say we have no way of knowing.


pages: 661 words: 187,613

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, elephant in my pajamas, finite state, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, natural language processing, out of africa, phenotype, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Saturday Night Live, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Yogi Berra

—Dan Quayle And who knows what unrepeatable amalgam of genes creates the linguistic genius? If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them. You can observe a lot just by watching. In baseball, you don’t know nothing. Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded. It ain’t over till it’s over. It gets late early this time of year. —Yogi Berra And NUH is the letter I use to spell Nutches Who live in small caves, known as Nitches, for hutches. These Nutches have troubles, the biggest of which is The fact that there are many more Nutches than Nitches. Each Nutch in a Nitch knows that some other Nutch Would like to move into his Nitch very much.

Universal human nature and individual uniqueness: Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a. Separated at birth: Holden, 1987; Lykken et al., 1992. Behavior genetics: Bouchard et al., 1990; Lykken et al., 1992; Plomin, 1990. Bushspeak: The Editors of The New Republic, 1992. Quaylespeak: Goldsman, 1992. Linguistic geniuses: Yogi Berra, from Safire, 1991; Lederer, 1987. Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), from On Beyond Zebra, 1955. Nabokov, from Lolita, 1958. King, from the march on Washington, 1963. Shakespeare, from Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2. 11. The Big Bang Elephants: Williams, 1989; Carrington, 1958. Darwinian explanations of the language instinct: Pinker & Bloom, 1990; Pinker, in press; Hurford, 1989, 1991; Newmeyer, 1991; Brandon & Hornstein, 1986; Corballis, 1991.


pages: 651 words: 180,162

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

A week with declining earnings for a taxi driver or a prostitute provides information concerning the environment and intimates the need to find a new part of town where clients hang around; a month or so without earnings drives them to revise their skills. Further, for a self-employed person, a small (nonterminal) mistake is information, valuable information, one that directs him in his adaptive approach; for someone employed like John, a mistake is something that goes into his permanent record, filed in the personnel department. Yogi Berra once said: “We made the wrong mistake”—and for John all mistakes are wrong mistakes. Nature loves small errors (without which genetic variations are impossible), humans don’t—hence when you rely on human judgment you are at the mercy of a mental bias that disfavors antifragility. So, alas, we humans are afraid of the second type of variability and naively fragilize systems—or prevent their antifragility—by protecting them.

It is a way—the only way—to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future, while reliance on narratives is the exact opposite: one is domesticated by uncertainty, and ironically set back. You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past. This brings us to the difference between doing and thinking. The point is hard to understand from the vantage point of intellectuals. As Yogi Berra said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.” So far we have seen arguments that intellect is associated with fragility and instills methods that conflict with tinkering. So far we saw the option as the expression of antifragility. We separated knowledge into two categories, the formal and the Fat Tonyish, heavily grounded in the antifragility of trial and error and risk taking with less downside, barbell-style—a de-intellectualized form of risk taking (or, rather, intellectual in its own way).


pages: 273 words: 72,024

Bitcoin for the Befuddled by Conrad Barski

Airbnb, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Isaac Newton, MITM: man-in-the-middle, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, node package manager, p-value, peer-to-peer, price discovery process, QR code, radical decentralization, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, software as a service, the payments system, Yogi Berra

Bitcoin has drawn society’s attention to the potential promises and perils of digital currencies in a largely digital world. Even if Bitcoin disappears, its creation has already influenced future legislation and policies toward digital currencies. The Future Potential of Bitcoin A quote that has been attributed at various times to several people, including Niels Bohr and Yogi Berra, is the maxim “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Nonetheless, in a book about Bitcoin, we would be remiss if we didn’t explore its potential in the future. First, we’ll look at the existential risks for Bitcoin—situations that could cause bitcoins to become worthless.


Emotional design: why we love (or hate) everyday things by Donald A. Norman

A Pattern Language, crew resource management, Dean Kamen, industrial robot, job automation, language acquisition, Neal Stephenson, Rodney Brooks, Vernor Vinge, Yogi Berra

Exploitative commercial objects such as Mona Lisa scarves and abominable plaster reproductions of sculptural masterpieces are described as kitsch, as are works that claim artistic value but are weak, cheap, or sentimental." "Sentimental" means, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, "resulting from or colored by emotion rather than reason or realism." "Emotion rather than reason"—well, yes, that is precisely the point. Yogi Berra put it this way: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." Or, translating this to design, "Nobody likes kitsch, it's too popular." Yup. If too many people like something, there must be something wrong with it. But isn't that very popularity telling us something? We should stop to consider just why it is popular.


pages: 273 words: 78,850

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy by Thomas Stanley, William Danko

affirmative action, cotton gin, estate planning, financial independence, high net worth, index fund, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, the market place, very high income, Yogi Berra

Given her age, fifty-one, and her income, $220,000, Sharon should, according to the wealth equation (expected net worth = one-tenth age × income), be worth approximately $1,122,000. Why is Sharon’s level of accumulated wealth far below the norm? Because her realized, or taxable, income is too high. Last year she paid $69,440 in federal tax on her $220,000 income. This is the equivalent of 18.8 percent of her total wealth. Yogi Berra might say, “Sharon, you can’t be wealthy. Your income is too high.” TABLE 2-3 CONTRASTS AMONG AMERICAN TAXPAYERS We believe that the average person in Sharon’s income/age category pays the equivalent of only 6.2 percent of his wealth in annual federal tax, or $69,440 divided by $1,122,000.


pages: 280 words: 71,268

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most. And I wanted to make sure people heard that. Larry Page and John Doerr, 2014. PART ONE OKRs in Action 1 Google, Meet OKRs If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. —Yogi Berra On a fall day in 1999, in the heart of Silicon Valley, I arrived at a two-story, L-shaped structure off the 101 freeway. It was young Google’s headquarters, and I’d come with a gift. The company had leased the building two months earlier, outgrowing a space above an ice-cream parlor in downtown Palo Alto.


pages: 293 words: 74,709

Bomb Scare by Joseph Cirincione

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

“Nuclear weapons proliferation,” he says, “occurred in the past, and can occur in the future, for more than one reason: different historical cases are best explained by different causal models.”102 Theoretical assumptions and conclusions both have enormous implications for nonproliferation policy. Each of the proliferation models leads us to draw different conclusions about how to best fight the spread of nuclear weapons. The result? Great difficulty in developing and sustaining a consistent and effective nonproliferation policy. Or as Yogi Berra said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” One way to resolve some of the differences in the theoretical models is to get the analysts to all start from the same page. That is, to forge a consensus around an objective assessment of the nuclear threats.


pages: 250 words: 77,544

Personal Investing: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore, Amy E. Buttell, Carol Fabbri

asset allocation, asset-backed security, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, fixed income, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, John Bogle, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Rubik’s Cube, Sharpe ratio, stocks for the long run, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Lots of folks would rather be certain of having a small amount of money than worry about whether a large nest egg might falter right when they need it. You might think that putting money into a guaranteed money market account means you won’t lose money. Think again. If your money doesn’t keep up with inflation, you lose buying power, which is the same as losing money. 20 Chapter 1 2 Set Your Investment Goals A ccording to Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” Planning for long-term goals seems overwhelming to a lot of people, tedious to many others. Whatever the reason, plenty of folks forego planning and hope for the best—or claim they’ll make do with whatever they end up with.


pages: 183 words: 17,571

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, disintermediation, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, underbanked, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The investment bankers thought they had the machinery and models to turn low-credit-score loans into Triple A securities. The crisis proved that the models and structures were deeply flawed in many cases. But the credit score itself suffers from the same basic limitation as all statistical efforts to predict the future based on history. Sometimes, to borrow from Yogi Berra, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” For the entire period when credit scores were being developed into objective predictive tools to measure the risk of default, the United States was enjoying what I’ve been calling the Great Moderation. Between 1982 and 2008 there had been a steady rise in asset prices, especially for homes, and job creation was robust enough to keep unemployment reasonably low.


pages: 245 words: 72,893

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

But the most interesting part is the final section (‘Utopia’), where Nozick argues that a minimal state leaves open all the important questions for individuals to decide for themselves. What kind of society do you want to live in? Who do you want to share it with? These are not matters to be settled by politics. These are things politics should leave up to us. Nozick makes his point with a list: Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsberg, Harry Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey Stengel, The Lubbavitcher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses, Einstein, Hugh Hefner, Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Baba Ram Das, Gandhi, Sir Edmund Hillary, Raymond Lubitz, Buddha, Frank Sinatra, Columbus, Freud, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams, Thomas Edison, H.


pages: 250 words: 75,151

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

After a distinguished career in the army (he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia), Colonel William Economos opened a flower shop in Marble Hill, a minuscule area so far uptown in New York (225th Street) that it appears to be part of the Bronx on the map, although it’s technically Manhattan. I vividly recall the water fights my brother Max and I had with the flower sprays in that shop and going to our first Yankees game in the summer of 1983 – I remember distinctly Papou pointing at a smiling old man with protruding ears on the team bench: ‘You see that guy? That’s Yogi Berra!’ – the team’s legendary catcher, manager and coach. Having become seriously rebellious in France and excluded from several schools, it occurred to my by then seriously distraught though not yet completely exasperated parents that it might be the French system that was the problem, and that I might actually flourish in an elite American boarding school, à la Dead Poets Society.


pages: 670 words: 194,502

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials) by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig

3Com Palm IPO, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate governance, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, George Santayana, hiring and firing, index fund, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the market place, the rule of 72, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra

We think the investor must be prepared for difficult times ahead—perhaps in the form of a fairly quick replay of the the 1969–1970 decline, or perhaps in the form of another bull-market fling, to be followed by a more catastrophic collapse.3 What Course to Follow Turn back to what we said in the last edition, reproduced on p. 75. This is our view at the same price level—say 900—for the DJIA in early 1972 as it was in late 1964. Commentary on Chapter 3 You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, ’cause you might not get there. —Yogi Berra Bull-Market Baloney In this chapter, Graham shows how prophetic he can be. He looks two years ahead, foreseeing the “catastrophic” bear market of 1973–1974, in which U.S. stocks lost 37% of their value.1 He also looks more than two decades into the future, eviscerating the logic of market gurus and best-selling books that were not even on the horizon in his lifetime.

If, however, business is faltering or the stock is underperforming its rivals, then the managers and directors are misusing the cash by refusing to pay a dividend. Companies that repeatedly split their shares—and hype those splits in breathless press releases—treat their investors like dolts. Like Yogi Berra, who wanted his pizza cut into four slices because “I don’t think I can eat eight,” the shareholders who love stock splits miss the point. Two shares of a stock at $50 are not worth more than one share at $100. Managers who use splits to promote their stock are aiding and abetting the worst instincts of the investing public, and the intelligent investor will think twice before turning any money over to such condescending manipulators.10 Companies should buy back their shares when they are cheap—not when they are at or near record highs.


Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris

air freight, airport security, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, disruptive innovation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, inventory management, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, Pepsi Challenge, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

People like Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, who was now senior consultant for a small game developer called PlayNet; Howard Phillips, Nintendo’s former Game Master, who was currently in between jobs; and Michael Katz, who could have probably helped Phillips, as he had become one of the videogame industry’s first headhunters (with a particular penchant for moving employees from Sega to Sony). “I’d like to take a moment,” Kalinske began vibrantly, officially kicking off this groundbreaking event, “right at the beginning of my remarks, to convey one of the more important pieces of news you’re likely to hear while at E3. Tomorrow, May 12, 1995, will be Yogi Berra’s birthday. His seventieth. So we all need to prepare ourselves for a heavier-than-usual onslaught of Yogiisms from radio and TV commentators. If I may, I’d like to kick off the birthday observance by repeating my own personal favorite of his: ‘When I come to a fork in the road, I take it.’ “Now that’s not only vintage Berra,” Kalinske continued, “but it’s also good for kicking off speeches.

Kalinske would say that it took money to make money, that the budget had risen in proportion with success, and what a small price it was to pay for global name recognition. And Peter Main would counter that style couldn’t compensate for lack of substance, that the budget had risen as product quality had diminished, and that while Sega might now have a global name, it should think long and hard about what its reputation was. “Lastly, I wanted to come back to Yogi Berra,” Kalinske said, relishing his last moments onstage. Would he be back next year? Five years from now? Ten? So much of that would depend on what he had to say next. “I think when Yogi said ‘fork in the road,’ he was talking about opportunity. When he sees opportunity, he takes it. And so we do. We’re taking all the opportunities we can to make this business soar.


pages: 286 words: 82,065

Curation Nation by Rosenbaum, Steven

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, future of journalism, independent contractor, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Mary Meeker, means of production, off-the-grid, PageRank, pattern recognition, post-work, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Yogi Berra

“The real issue that remains is access to an audience. Because that’s hard. Access to technology has become trivially easy for most people in the industrialized world, and increasingly easy for people in the emerging economies around the world.” In trying to humanize the problem of too much democratization of speech, Blau channels the wordplay of Yogi Berra: “There’d be some wonderful thing that he would say—‘The problem when you can talk to anybody is that you can’t talk to anybody.’” There’s no doubt Blau is right. Speech is easy; being heard is hard and getting harder, because computers can’t distinguish between data and ideas. Or between human intellect and aggregated text and links.


pages: 306 words: 82,765

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Nobody embodies the notion of symmetry better than Isocrates, who lived more than a century and made significant contributions when he was in his nineties. He even managed a rare dynamic version of the Golden Rule: “Conduct yourself toward your parents as you would have your children conduct themselves toward you.” We had to wait for the great baseball coach Yogi Berra to get another such dynamic rule for symmetric relations: “I go to other people’s funerals so they come to mine.” More effective, of course, is the reverse direction, to treat one’s children the way one wished to be treated by one’s parents.fn2 The very idea behind the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States is to establish a silver rule–style symmetry: you can practice your freedom of religion so long as you allow me to practice mine; you have the right to contradict me so long as I have the right to contradict you.


pages: 237 words: 82,266

You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up by Annabelle Gurwitch

Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Donald Trump, Donner party, Exxon Valdez, Future Shock, Joan Didion, Mahatma Gandhi, open immigration, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Yogi Berra

And it’s also true that if I put as much time and energy into my writing career as I continue to put into Ezra’s baseball, by this point I could have written at least three War and Peace–sized novels, a dozen screenplays, a half dozen plays, two books of short stories, and a collection of poetry, not to mention having a regular magazine column, my own comedy show on the Web, and still have time left over to resculpt my body at a gym and invent my own language. But it’s been totally worth it because nothing is better than seeing your son smash a hit into the outfield, round third, and score or make a great catch. And last year, after he made the last out and his travel team won a big tournament, he leaped into my arms like Yogi Berra did to Don Larsen after he pitched a perfect game in the 1956 World Series. I know, no matter what happens after Ezra’s travel team, the Titans, goes to play in Cooperstown in 2010 for the Field of Dreams Tournament, he’ll always remember that day he jumped in my arms to celebrate the victory. And if he does ever forget, I’ll be sure to remind him.


pages: 272 words: 83,378

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto by Mark Helprin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, computer age, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, Easter island, hive mind, independent contractor, invention of writing, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, plutocrats, race to the bottom, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, the scientific method, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

But one need not be a Nazi brontosaurus to question the trajectories of one’s time if indeed one’s time produces people who think their grandchildren are their ancestors. I return to this example out of continuing astonishment, but it is accurately representative. At a rest stop in Maryland not long ago, I heard a high school girl ask her father where they were “now” (perhaps she was related to Yogi Berra). When told “Maryland,” she asked, “Is that in New Jersey?” Nor need one be senescent to note that the middle ground has been continually pressed to the extremes, so that on one edge of what is published we have, from Edna Moisture, professor of gender studies at California State University at Uponga: To clarify the fascistic class burst of intra-pseudo-transgenderism, one must accept that the other is the object of the actor, and the actor is an apodeictic imagination of the object.


pages: 142 words: 18,753

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Community Supported Agriculture, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, PalmPilot, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

At a conference of economists one should begin by telling the one about a few billion here and a few billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money, or the one about how if you laid a thousand economists end to end they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion, or the one about how economists look for keys under the street lamp because that is where the light is. At least one speaker per panel should refer to Yogi Berra, and everybody in the audience must chuckle to prove how unpretentious they are. Then the speaker will have to judge how dull she can afford to be. Very eminent panelists are expected to be dull, since their words carry great weight. High government officials, university presidents, and corporate leaders are expected to speak in the Upper Institutional mode—a vocabulary so dense and vague of content as to cause people’s mouths to hang open and their eyes to water.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But as the technology begins to prove itself in terms of safety, reliability, savings and convenience, opinion and the debate could quickly shift from, “I don’t want to share the road with robots” to “I don’t want to share the road with people driving their own cars.” The Disruption Dilemma “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Yogi Berra Driverless cars are effectively the digitization of a very visible part of the physical world. They have emerged as the new battlefront for some of the largest companies in the world, primarily from outside the traditional auto industry. Why? The technology required is beyond most traditional car companies, at least without significant expenditure to quickly gain expertise.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

At least for a while, they will be the only people left who will have a clear notion of what is going on. 12 A New Social Contract? What will become of America as a whole in twenty to forty years? What will our politics look like in the new world of work? One is reminded of the old saw attributed to Yogi Berra: “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.” Still, it can help us make sense of the present to lay down some possible trends about where things are headed. A lot of people will have serious objections to some of these trends. So be it. Let’s first understand where the trends might be coming from.


pages: 278 words: 84,002

Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict by Max Brooks, John Amble, M. L. Cavanaugh, Jaym Gates

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, British Empire, data acquisition, false flag, invisible hand, Jon Ronson, risk tolerance, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, The future is already here, Yogi Berra

-led coalition’s performance in Afghanistan triggered significant concerns as to whether the United States was repeating Russian missteps in that country, while ethnic tensions have begun to rise once again in Kosovo. And despite the fact that the collapse of the USSR marked for many a decisive “end of history,” post-Soviet Russia has had its own back-to-the-future moment in an effort to position itself for competition with the United States in Europe and beyond. As Yogi Berra put it, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Charles Hill reminds us that great fiction and literature provides a creative, methodologically unbound way to contemplate our circumstances, including statecraft.1 Star Wars is no exception. Many, of course, maintain that the Star Wars movies are merely a lengthy space opera with the occasional camp line thrown in for good measure.


pages: 281 words: 79,464

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, classic study, Columbine, David Brooks, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Ferguson, Missouri, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Paul Erdős, period drama, Peter Singer: altruism, public intellectual, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

If someone were to wonder why you should save the drowning child—the sort of question only a philosopher would ask, I suppose—one good answer is that if you let her die, things would be worse. She would have lost out on all the good things that come from being alive, and there would be terrible suffering on the part of others. By wading in and pulling her out, you avert all those awful consequences. Often the consequences of our actions are uncertain. As Yogi Berra once put it: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” A young man has serious problems with drugs and gets arrested; his wealthy parents bail him out. Or they don’t; they leave him in prison overnight so that he learns a lesson. A woman decides to have an abortion; a student cheats on an exam that he needs to pass to keep his scholarship; a man leaves Wall Street to join the seminary.


pages: 266 words: 85,265

Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal by Erik Vance

classic study, fixed income, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hive mind, impulse control, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, nocebo, personalized medicine, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, side project, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Yogi Berra

Take it one step further: Forget about cheating altogether. Looking at two clean athletes, how can we be sure that the difference between a 4-minute mile and a 3-minute-and-59-second mile isn’t just a slightly better internal pharmacy? It kind of changes the meaning of the phrase “level playing field.” Baseball savant Yogi Berra once said, “Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.” At the time, people just made fun of his math skills. But with our growing understanding of the power of the brain to enhance everything from cycling to tennis to weight lifting, it’s starting to look as if Yogi was correct.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

That something we need to trust, Samson is saying, is a concrete law, guaranteed by the twenty-eight members of a community of five hundred million people, designed around the protection of data. That law, which turns the surveillance economy on its head, is doing Renate Samson’s job for her. It might even make Big Brother Watch redundant. To borrow some words from the former New York Yankees shortstop Yogi Berra, listening to the second entrepreneur, a self-funded former telecom executive, is “like déjà vu all over again.” It feels as if we are back in 1995 and everything is once again possible. He even begins with the same promise of being the “first” kind of data company to create a product designed for “people.”


pages: 290 words: 86,718

The Estrogen Fix: The Breakthrough Guide to Being Healthy, Energized, and Hormonally Balanced by Mache Seibel

longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), traumatic brain injury, women in the workforce, working poor, Yogi Berra

Also know that even though your estrogen levels are dropping during perimenopause, you can still become pregnant. Unless you want to get pregnant, be sure to use a reliable method of birth control until you have gone 12 months without a period. Many women choose to use a diaphragm, condoms, or an IUD in perimenopause. Every year or so one of my patients comes in with a “surprise” pregnancy. As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Barbara had her last period at the age of 54. She finally decided to seek help because she suffered from hot flashes and night sweats that affected her quality of life. “My body was like the engine in a luxury sports car that goes from zero to 60 in a matter of seconds.


pages: 306 words: 86,242

Why We Run: A Natural History by Bernd Heinrich

delayed gratification, Gregor Mendel, phenotype, Yogi Berra

I ask myself: Is there anyone else in America who might be an even greater lunatic than I, who might push himself even harder? A small voice says, Probably. So I push again, a little harder. Am I crazy? Perhaps. But I must judge both my and others’ ability accurately, maintain absolute integrity to my vision, and be guided strictly by cause and effect, by empirical reality. As Yogi Berra said about baseball, “It’s ninetypercent mental. The other half is physical.” After about 4 hours, the sun is blazing hot and the wind has picked up. Jack still holds out the welcoming squeeze bottle full of cranberry juice every few miles. I grab, squirt, swallow, drop the bottle, and am glad to have both hands swinging free again . . .


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

The car steered itself, but humans controlled throttle and brake, out of a perfectly reasonable concern for safety. j As of this writing, another technological behemoth, Apple, is rumored to be developing an automobile that may be self-driving. k It’s been attributed to everyone from the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr to Yogi Berra, and is almost certainly the only time those two giants of the twentieth century have been confused with one another. EPILOGUE Flatbush and Atlantic IN JANUARY OF 2006 I GOT A CALL FROM THE OFFICE OF ONE OF NEW York City’s most prominent and ambitious developers, Forest City Ratner, itself a subsidiary of an even larger Cleveland-based real-estate behemoth.


pages: 310 words: 89,838

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

Veltman gave his lecture, “The LHC and the Higgs Boson,” on the second day. Video and slides available from the CERN website. 4 See “The Unhiggs,” by David Stancato and John Terning, Journal of High Energy Physics, no. 11 (2009): 101. 5 The phrase and variations on it are commonly attributed to both Niels Bohr and Yogi Berra. Bohr’s version appears in, among other works, Between Inner Space and Outer Space: Essays on Science, Art, and Philosophy, by John Barrow, Oxford University Press, 2000. 6 For more on the idea of manipulating the Higgs field, see an online seminar by physicist Kim Griest at the University of California, Davis.


pages: 301 words: 86,278

Women and Autoimmune Disease by Robert G. Lahita

Gregor Mendel, medical residency, stem cell, systems thinking, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

Today, many of these drugs are so good that they allow people with autoimmune disease to live quite normal lives. In fact, a great many reach remission, although even in remission, drugs must often be continued to ensure that the disease remains in check. Medicine, as I have mentioned, is half art, half science, and, with a nod to Yogi Berra, half luck. This certainly holds true when it comes to treating autoimmune diseases, although treatment always requires an expert with experience to calculate the dosage of a drug or drugs, the duration of therapy, and simply to know what to use when, for what, on whom. This is one of those areas where it is critical to have a well-trained and proficient physician specialist.


pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Even more intriguing is the concept the engineers at Nokia are currently working on, which is a way to harvest ambient electromagnetic radiation emitted from things like Wi-Fi transmitters and cell phone towers that surround us every day, filling the air with energy to recharge batteries or run small devices. EPILOGUE Bring on the Future “Prediction is very hard, especially when it’s about the future.” —Yogi Berra Predictions far into the future are always dangerous. This is painfully evidenced by the legions of baby boomers who have grown to middle age and beyond still waiting for the arrival of flying cars and personal jet packs promised in the magazines of their youth. In the more distant future are ultracapacitors or double-layer capacitors or electric double-layer capacitors.


pages: 305 words: 89,103

Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough by Sendhil Mullainathan

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive load, computer vision, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, happiness index / gross national happiness, impulse control, indoor plumbing, inventory management, knowledge worker, late fees, linear programming, mental accounting, microcredit, p-value, payday loans, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

In a way, this had to be good—the restaurant was popular. But it can also be a bad thing. Long lines can make you proud, but they bring in no money. You need people inside and eating, not outside and waiting. Customers can get disgruntled and not come back. You don’t want it said of you, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded,” as Yogi Berra put it. To understand what might be done—raise prices? expand?—Kimes conducted a thorough statistical analysis, which gave her a snapshot more precise than the staff’s impressions: What was the income per table? Which tables were most occupied? What was the turnover? And so on. What she found surprised her.


pages: 288 words: 92,175

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, British Empire, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, desegregation, financial independence, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operation paperclip, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, space junk, Steve Jobs, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra

When Harry mentioned the World Series game to Barbara’s obstetrician, he confessed that he too was desperate to see it, and they searched until they found a TV. It was Game Four, the Pittsburgh Pirates versus the New York Yankees. Absorbed by the game, the pair kept their eyes on Yankee Stadium, where the game remained scoreless until the bottom of the fourth. Mickey Mantle struck out and Yogi Berra ground out before their teammate Bill Skowron hit a home run. The game suddenly had become a nail-biter when the doctor was called back into the delivery room. Harry snapped back to reality. He was about to become a father. As the Pirates narrowly beat the Yankees, 3–2, Barbara cuddled her baby girl, who had weighed in at nine pounds six ounces.


pages: 366 words: 87,916

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner

card file, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra

You may enjoy reading French magazines or watching Russian TV shows. You may fall in love with Chinese vocabulary, or you may fall in love with a new Italian friend. This is your language. Take it wherever you want to go. SETTING GOALS: YOUR CUSTOM VOCABULARY If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else. —Yogi Berra How many words should you learn? Which words should you learn? The answer depends upon you: what do you want to do with your language? Back in Chapter 4, we discussed using frequency lists to help streamline your vocabulary acquisition. I gave you a list of 625 basic words to learn and showed you how to learn them quickly.


pages: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Burroughs, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Maya Angelou, Frank and Jesse James, Calamity Jane, Dale Carnegie, Max Factor, Charles Lindbergh, Edwin Hubble, Joseph Pulitzer, Adolphus ‘Budweiser’ Busch, James ‘McDonnell Douglas’ McDonnell, Bill ‘Jet’ Lear, J.C. Penney, Kenneth ‘Enron’ Lay, Walter Cronkite, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Barker, Yogi Berra, Payne Stewart, Scott Joplin, Charlie Parker, Basil Poledouris, Chuck Berry, Grace Bumbry, Burt Bacharach, Sheryl Crow, Eminem, Josephine Baker, Wallace Beery, Robert Cummings, Jean Harlow, Walt Disney, Betty Grable. John Huston, Ginger Rogers, Jane Wyman, William Powell, Fritz Freleng, Vincent Price, Robert Altman, Dick van Dyke, Dennis Weaver, John Milius, Kathleen Turner, Geraldine Page, John Goodman, Don Johnson, Scott Bakula, Chris Cooper, Linda Blair, Brad Pitt


pages: 286 words: 90,530

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

CONTROVERSY The skeptic's chaplain: Richard Dawkins as a fountainhead of skepticism Michael Shermer OVER the weekend of 12 to 14 August 2001, I participated in an event entitled ‘Humanity 3000’, whose mission it was to bring together ‘prominent thinkers from around the world in a multidisciplinary framework to ponder issues that are most likely to have a significant impact on the long-term future of humanity’. Sponsored by the Foundation for the Future—a non-profit think tank in Seattle founded by aerospace engineer and benefactor Walter P. Kistler—long-term is defined as a millennium. We were tasked with the job of prognosticating what the world will be like in the year 3000. Yeah, sure. As Yogi Berra said, ‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future’. If such a workshop were held in 1950 would anyone have anticipated the World Wide Web? If we cannot prognosticate fifty years in the future, what chance do we have of saying anything significant about a date twenty times more distant?


pages: 304 words: 87,702

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, Golden Gate Park, if you build it, they will come, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Accommodations range from $49 a night for a room to $5,000 per week for a house. HOW TO GET IN TOUCH Chautauqua Institution, P.O. Box 28, Chautauqua, NY 14722, 800-836-2787 or 716-357-6250 (box office), www.ciweb.org. HORIZON & CO. take a radical sabbatical IN THE UNITED STATES & WORLDWIDE When you come to a fork in the road, take it. —Yogi Berra 59 | Rather than supplying information—the purpose of most intellectual sojourns—a “radical sabbatical” is designed to seek information. From you. You’ll be asked the kinds of questions that tend to get pushed to the back burner in our busy lives: “What do you stand for?” “Why are you here?”


pages: 293 words: 90,714

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism by Mikael Colville-Andersen

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, business cycle, car-free, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Enrique Peñalosa, functional fixedness, gamification, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, self-driving car, sharing economy, smart cities, starchitect, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

A much-needed bike rack placed outside the front entrance of the Clarion Hotel & Congress Trondheim. The OhBoy Bicycle House development in Malmö, Sweden. Car-free living in a modern city. © Hauschild + Siegel Architects CHAPTER 11 DESIRE LINES AND UNDERSTANDING BEHAVIOR You can observe a lot by watching. Yogi Berra Cyclist on a desire line trajectory across an intersection in Copenhagen. Yep. You’ve heard it before. You might even have said it or at least thought it. Those damned cyclists. As bicycles return to our cities, many urban dwellers are trying to figure out cyclists, those urban autists. By and large, the primary focus is on behavior, but with an overwhelmingly negative focus that clouds all the positive aspects of having a cycling population in a city.


pages: 313 words: 95,077

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

Or rather, he tried to create a bulletin board, but the first such service he selected simply couldn’t cope with the crush of excited users all trying to log in at the same time. Seeing this, he selected a second bulletin board service, but that too crashed under the sudden shock of demand, as did the third. (These kinds of failures, sometimes called “success crises,” bring to mind Yogi Berra’s famous observation about a New York restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”) He finally found a service that could accommodate the thousands of people following the Sidekick saga, and those readers settled in, discussing every aspect of the events, from general speculation about Sasha’s moral compass to a forum inviting members of the military to talk about Luis, the MP, and his involvement in the events.


pages: 308 words: 94,447

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Easter island, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Jacob Silverman, Maui Hawaii, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, out of africa, seminal paper, Skype, Steven Pinker, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra

In addition to the Neanderthal Museum, a strikingly modern building with walls of bottle green glass, there are cafés selling Neanderthal-brand beer, gardens planted with the sorts of shrubs that flourished during the ice ages, and hiking trails leading to the site of the find, though the bones, the cave, and even the cliffs are all gone. (The limestone was quarried and carted away as building blocks.) Directly inside the museum’s entrance stands a model of an elderly Neanderthal smiling benignantly and leaning on a stick. He resembles an unkempt Yogi Berra. Next to him is one of the museum’s most popular attractions: a booth called the Morphing Station. For three euros, visitors to the station can get a profile shot of themselves and, facing that, a second profile that’s been doctored. In the doctored shot, the chin recedes, the forehead slopes, and the back of the head bulges out.


pages: 319 words: 95,854

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity by Robert Lane Greene

anti-communist, British Empire, centre right, discovery of DNA, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Parag Khanna, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Funny how I didn’t think any of this was peculiar at the time, when it was behaviour with “Proto Stickler” written all over it. What’s going on here? “Tautology” isn’t a grammar error; it’s a logical one, with either unnecessary reinforcement in a phrase (“free gift,” also called a pleonasm) or a statement written so that it can’t be falsified, for example by definition or circular logic. Think of Yogi Berra’s “You can observe a lot by watching.” This isn’t nitpicking (although one could be forgiven for picking the nits off of the self-appointed world-beating nitpicker). It shows a major problem in many people’s thinking about language errors: category error. “Grammar,” to the language specialist, is how words and sentences are built from meaningful components.


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Or will we keep depending on flows of energy and resources so huge that they will eventually shake apart the fantastically complex societies we have built in the past two hundred years? Part IV * * * THE FUTURE Chapter 12 Where Is It All Going? It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. —YOGI BERRA (ATTRIBUTED) Man has too long forgotten that the Earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste. —CHARLES PERKINS Marsh, MAN AND NATURE Future Games In the introduction we met the fantastic motley cavalcade of all things, with its stars and serpents, its quarks and cell phones, all marching to the distant thunder of supernovas under the unblinking but weary gaze of entropy.


pages: 305 words: 98,072

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely by Andrew Craig

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business cycle, collaborative consumption, diversification, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Future Shock, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, passive income, pensions crisis, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, smart cities, stocks for the long run, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

At the very least, I urge you to read both chapters. Doing so will mean you are best placed to decide which of these approaches is best for you personally and they should get you excited about the vast opportunities that lie ahead. 9. MAPPING YOUR ROUTE “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else.” – Yogi Berra Working up a budget is perhaps one of the most important steps you will take on your road to financial success. It is probably fair to say that many people do this in some shape or form, but it is probably not controversial to suggest there are three things that relatively few people do: Make a sufficiently detailed budget – throw in everything but the kitchen sink … Budget for your dream life – plan for the life that you actually want rather than the one you have today.


pages: 320 words: 97,509

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician by Sandeep Jauhar

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, delayed gratification, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, medical malpractice, moral hazard, obamacare, PalmPilot, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, source of truth, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra

He went to see the patient and immediately noticed that the whites of her eyes had black discoloration, a sign of a potentially serious metabolic derangement. No doctor had commented on it during the presentation. “I did a … hello!” the cardiologist recalled. “How could they have missed it? All through the chart was written ‘pupils equally round and reactive to light.’ It was obvious no one had examined her. I subscribe to the Yogi Berra School of physical diagnosis. You can learn a lot by looking.” Tom smiled, slowly chewing his scrambled eggs. “I majored in music in college,” he said. “Knowing how to separate sounds and time them correctly has helped me immensely in listening to the heart. It’d be a shame if we lost those diagnostic skills.


pages: 371 words: 101,792

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am by Robert Gandt

airline deregulation, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, flag carrier, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Maui Hawaii, RAND corporation, revenue passenger mile, Tenerife airport disaster, yield management, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Archer was a real Skygod, which is to say, one in full possession of his dignity. He doffed his cap. “Why, certainly, madam,” he said, and took the lady’s bags inside. He cheerfully accepted the tip. “We cannot absorb revenue loss without taking severe steps to lower our costs commensurate with the reduced revenue.” It was a classic Plaskettism, worthy of Yogi Berra. What the chairman meant was that he was pink-slipping another four thousand employees. Back in August when Iraq ventured into Kuwait and traffic slumped, Pan Am had eliminated two thousand jobs. Now, with this latest announcement, a full 20 percent of Pan Am’s work force had become casualties of the Gulf War.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

When all the forces are arrayed against an asset or an idea and are invested in its falling, that’s usually a pretty good sign it’s about to rise. Many of the loudest proclamations of decline come from those who thought the period from 2001 to 2008 was a rip-roaring good time, the Bush Boom. The consensus is frequently wrong, especially the consensus of those who predict the near future. As Yogi Berra put it, “It’s tough to make predictions. Especially about the future.” Looking at their models in 2007, forecasters told us housing prices couldn’t fall, the economy wouldn’t lapse into recession, and all those subprime borrowers were good credit risks. The fraternity of seers who, in March 2009, saw the stock market rising back to 12,000 within two years was about as small as the exclusive club that saw it plummeting from 14,700 to 6,600 in the space of six months.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

I act not out of obligation or idealism, but because I live in a straw house and I smell smoke.”10 CHAPTER 26 Back To Work Markets flatter our solitary egos but leave our yearnings for community unsatisfied. They advance individualistic, not social, goals, and they encourage us to speak the language of “I want” not the language of “we need.” —BENJAMIN BARBER, A Place for Us If you don’t go to somebody’s funeral, they won’t come to yours. —YOGI BERRA Is there any better feeling than being back in the world after an extended illness? Good-bye, daytime TV, and Hello, energy! The challenge is to channel the energy productively. Gandhi said, “there’s more to life than increasing its speed.” We might add that there’s more to life than increasing its greed.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Bostrom 2008, in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, ed. by B. Gordijn and R. Chadwick. New York: Springer, pp. 107–37. 12: Journey to the Stars 1. This particular quote has engendered a lot of speculation and misattribution. For example, it cannot be reliably attributed to baseball manager and purveyor of malapropisms Yogi Berra. It seems to originate in nineteenth-century Denmark and was used but not coined by physicist Niels Bohr. A detailed discussion is online at http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/. 2. See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pogue-all-time-worst-tech-predictions/; and http://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/12-worst-tech-predictions-of-all-time/d/d-id/1096169. 3.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

United States–Economic policy–2009 2. United States–Economic conditions–2009 3. Middle class–United States–Economic conditions. I. Title. HC106.84.F38 2012 330.973–dc23 2012013719 To my wife, Marge, helpmate and soul mate Part I The Pursuit of Folly The future ain't what it used to be. —Yogi Berra 1 The Politics of Hope Historians who look back to our time will surely conclude that our problem was not that we didn’t know where we were headed, it was that we didn’t act on what we knew. Even before the financial crash of 2008–2009 and the Great Recession that followed, there was ample warning.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendshoring, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

I find that a bleak prognosis evokes “All Along the Watchtower,” the Bob Dylan anthem that became a Jimi Hendrix megahit: “There must be some way outta here/Said the joker to the thief. There’s too much confusion/I can’t get no relief.” Maybe you have young children or grandchildren—or you are optimistic by nature. You want to leave a better world to future generations. So do I. Moreover, I readily admit that no one can predict the future with certainty. The Yankees manager Yogi Berra famously quipped that “it is hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” We might catch some unforeseen breaks. Resourceful humans solve big problems, as my own ancestors did when violent religious prejudice drove them away from their homes in Central Asia to the Middle East, then Europe, and finally the United States.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Therefore, we need to collect two sets of data: If the treated customers buy more than the control customers, we know the campaign successfully persuades. This proves some individuals were influenced, but, as usual, we don’t know which. Predicting the Wrong Thing If you come to a fork in the road, take it. —Yogi Berra To target the marketing campaigns, Michael and his team at U.S. Bank were employing the industry standard: response models, which predict who will buy if contacted. That’s not the same thing as predicting who will buy because they were contacted; it does not predict influence. Compared to a control set, Michael showed the campaigns were successful, turning a profit.


pages: 326 words: 106,053

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

As a result, if everyone thinks the bar will be crowded on Friday night, then few people will go. The bar, therefore, will be empty, and anyone who goes will have a good time. On the other hand, if everyone thinks the bar won’t be crowded, everyone will go. Then the bar will be packed, and no one will have a good time. (This problem was captured perfectly, of course, by Yogi Berra, when he said of Toots Shor’s nightclub: “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”) The trick, of course, is striking the right balance, so that every week enough—but not too many—people go. There is, of course, an easy solution to this problem: just invent an all-powerful central planner—a kind of über-doorman—who tells people when they can go to the bar.


Capital Ideas Evolving by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, creative destruction, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, price anchoring, price stability, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

.* Yet people who are not so smart frequently become rich. If they are lucky enough to avoid being wiped out immediately, they can survive for a long time and create all kinds of mispricings that scare away more sober investors. Keynes observes that the market could stay at crazy levels longer than most people could even imagine.† Yogi Berra is reported to have said that forecasting is very difficult, especially when it comes to the future. Most of life is about making decisions whose outcome is hidden from us. Faced with what looks like an impossibly complex process, why would we not tend to look for shortcuts—or heuristics—to reach our decision more easily?


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Part I provides the motivation for deep learning and the background needed to understand its origins; part II explains learning algorithms in several different types of neural network architectures; and part III explores the impact that deep learning is having on our lives and what impact it may have in years to come. But, as the New York Yankees’ philosopher Yogi Berra once said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Text boxes in eight of the chapters to follow provide technical background to the story; timelines at the beginning of the three parts keep track of events that bear on that story and extend over sixty years. I Intelligence Reimagined Timeline 1956—The Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Summer Research Project gave birth to the field of AI and motivated a generation of scientists to explore the potential for information technology to match the capabilities of humans. 1962—Frank Rosenblatt published Principles of Neurodynamics: Perceptrons and the Theory of Brain Mechanisms, which introduced a learning algorithm for neural network models with a single layer of variable weights—the precursor of today’s learning algorithms for deep neural network models. 1962—David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel published “Receptive Fields, Binocular Interaction and Functional Architecture in the Cat’s Visual Cortex,” which reported for the first time the response properties of single neurons recorded with a microelectrode.


pages: 355 words: 63

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

A s Isaac Newton said, “If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”14 Today’s innovators don’t take into account that their innovation will permanently increase the productivity of the economy; they get the returns to their innovation only until the next ”new, new thing” comes along. This means once again that the private return to innovation is less than the social return. The extreme case is that no innovation happens because people are afraid subsequent innovation will happen. As Yogi Berra once said about a restaurant, “Nobody goes there; it’s too crowded.” For the reason of nonappropriability and obsolescence, the rate of technological innovation will tend to be too slow in a market economy. These disincentives to innovation can beso strong that thereis no innovation and thus no growth in a free market economy.


pages: 372 words: 115,094

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Ken Adelman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, It's morning again in America, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative, summit fever, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

Analysts spend loads of time trying to read the minds of people who haven’t made up their minds. That’s why the intelligence community is more comfortable describing what happened or what is happening than what will happen—which is what policy makers most need to know. All forecasting is dicey, as Yogi Berra put it, especially about the future. While bad, this intelligence failure was not debilitating. Despite Don Regan’s dictates, Shultz bulked up the arms team going to Reykjavik. So he had the expertise on hand to pivot when needed. Of some consolation is how the KGB’s performance was even worse than the CIA’s.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

Sue Watts and her colleagues found that when they tried repeating the experiment, the whisper numbers had become useless, with wider variation and no value over the consensus estimates. This is yet another example of the wisdom of a collective depending on choosing the members of the collective carefully so none of them have an incentive to mislead the rest. As noted earnings analyst Yogi Berra might explain, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Monitoring Web Activity: No GUI, No Glory Chapters 9 and 10 describe some of the many examples of how and why investors and traders would want to collect, aggregate, and evaluate many flavors of content from the Web—news, pre-news, SEC filings, and messages are a small sample, and the molecular search filters to decide what is interesting are some of the simpler varieties.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Notwithstanding this implied criticism, history will judge the federal government’s health IT initiatives in the 2004–2015 era favorably, as a time when its actions kick-started the digital transformation of the healthcare system, a transformation that—if we can ever reach the state I’ve described here—will have made the healthcare system better, safer, and cheaper. 39 They are listed at the end of the book. 40 Today, a version of this model is known as the Patient-Centered Medical Home, but no one has yet sorted out all the details, particularly the data integration part. 41 Another FYI: I am on the advisory board of a start-up named Amino.com, one of many trying to build such a Webbased tool. Chapter 28 The Nontechnological Side of Making Health IT Work Ninety percent of this game is half mental. —Yogi Berra While the future world I’ve just depicted may seem fantastical, there is nothing in it that is science fiction—all the technologies I discussed are available today or will be available very soon (which goes a long way toward explaining why today’s health IT is so irritating). I’ve already described some of the business and policy changes that will be needed to achieve this vision.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Ambitious missions were announced in John F. Kennedy fashion by one administration only to be canceled by the next. Funding waxed and waned in response to the prevailing political winds. As a result, NASA lacked a clear vision. In 2012, shortly before his death, Neil Armstrong reportedly invoked the baseball legend Yogi Berra to describe the agency’s predicament: “If you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there.”2 We didn’t know where we would go after NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011—our only means of reaching the International Space Station—with no replacement in place. After the remaining space shuttles rolled off the launch pads and into museums, American astronauts had to ride shotgun to the station on Russian rockets.


pages: 358 words: 119,272

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, collective bargaining, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, diversified portfolio, fake news, financial engineering, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, hindsight bias, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Money creation, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stocks for the long run, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Avoiding bears preserves wealth, but buying cheap in a bear market, given the positive real long-term returns from equities, is even more profitable. This field guide to the financial bear focuses on the very lucrative periods in history when equity prices had been pushed well below fair value and rebound was imminent. As US baseball legend Yogi Berra once said, ‘You can observe a lot just by watching’. By watching the financial bears, we can observe the point at which a number of potential factors come together to signal the market can only get better. Those factors include low valuations, improved earnings, improving liquidity, falling bond yields, and changes in how the market is perceived by those who play it.


pages: 413 words: 115,274

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

“Lack of adequate parking facilities in central districts has contributed to a great extent in bringing these conditions about.” Planners continued to cling to the idea that the downtown revival was just a parking lot away. And they planned accordingly. By focusing on how hard it was to park, they made policy of Yogi Berra’s aphorism “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” * * * The story of how so many cities sought to imitate the suburbs and regretted it is exemplified by the career of the man called upon to rescue the American city in its time of parking need: Victor Gruen, the inventor of the mall.


pages: 435 words: 120,574

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

Or was that too easy an idea, an idea from my side of the empathy wall? I’d taken measure of the talk and silences of public life in the heartland of the right. I’d seen what my Tea Party friends were putting up with. But the empathy wall was higher than I’d imagined. I could see what they couldn’t see, but not—as Yogi Berra might say—what I couldn’t see. I still felt blind to what they saw and honored. I needed to do something else, to enter the social terrain that surrounded and influenced them. Included in that were industry, state government, the church, and the press. How did these basic institutions influence their feelings about life?


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

They have owners that do not cherish the unpredictability of innovation competition, and substantial investment in building such businesses. Western economies, as we will discuss further in Chapter 9, should worry about an innovation famine rather than an innovation feast. 9 THE FUTURE AND HOW TO PREVENT IT The future ain’t what it used to be. Yogi Berra, baseball legend A society does not ever die “from natural causes” but always dies from suicide or murder – and nearly always from the former. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History1 Westerners should not worry about an innovation blitz. Their concern should rather be that innovation and technological change no longer power their economies as much as they should and could, and that economic stagnation fuels economic inequality and political populism.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

For more advanced undergraduate students, Arild Vatn provides an introduction to institutional economics as applied to environmental economic policy in his 2005 book, Institutions and the Environment. 168 8  |  The marginal productivity theory of income distribution – or you’re worth what you can get ‘Are we so committed to the framework of marginal produc­ tivity and its implicit claim … that the distribution of income is legit­ imated by market forces? Are we prepared to rule the issues of power, monopoly and financial control off the table when we discuss the way incomes are apportioned …?’ James K. Galbraith (1998: 37) ‘In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.’ Yogi Berra We’ve emphasized in previous chapters how standard textbooks downplay one of the main economic goals – equity – in favour of the other – efficiency. This emphasis shows up again in the placement of chapters explaining the distribution of income. They are invariably towards the end of the book, and, because of time constraints, the typical introductory economics course may not cover them.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

The emphasis is on the need for humility, for policy diversity, for selective and modest reforms, and for experimentation.”39 Last, much of the world is poor because the rich countries have not tried very hard to make it otherwise. I realize that pointing out the failure of development aid and then arguing for more of it is like Yogi Berra criticizing a restaurant for having bad food and small portions. Still, things become better when there is an overwhelming political will to make them better. That is bigger than economics. Epilogue Life in 2050: Seven Questions Economics can help us to understand and improve an imperfect world.


pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Called kin selection by evolutionary psychologists (and nepotism by everyone else), keeping close tabs on members of the community—even taking risks and making personal sacrifices on their behalf—became a normal feature of life in these small towns. Helping people was a way of helping your own genes survive, though no one is explicitly aware of that. Residents simply expect that when they need help they’ll get it, and at some point they’ll return the favor. Yogi Berra summed up the concept nicely: “Always go to other people’s funerals. Otherwise they won’t come to yours.” That’s how reciprocal altruism can be fostered by kin selection in such small, isolated groups of people. Given how tight the Blue Zone Sardinians are, how committed to watching out for one another, this longevity-promoting social cohesion may have been selected for over many centuries of geographic and genetic isolation.7 In the here and now, the act of helping other people releases feel-good neuropeptides and endorphins—that’s the positive side.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

* * * Over the weekend of August 12–14, 2001, I participated in an event titled “Humanity 3000,” whose mission it was to bring together “prominent thinkers from around the world in a multidisciplinary framework to ponder issues that are most likely to have a significant impact on the long-term future of humanity.” Sponsored by the Foundation for the Future – a nonprofit think tank in Seattle founded by aerospace engineer and benefactor Walter P. Kistler – long-term is defined as a millennium. We were tasked with the job of prognosticating what the world will be like in the year 3000. Yeah, sure. As Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” If such a workshop were held in 1950 would anyone have anticipated the World Wide Web? If we cannot prognosticate fifty years in the future, what chance do we have of saying anything significant about a date twenty times more distant?


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

Terry Hazen of the University of California’s prestigious Lawrence Livermore Laboratory announced in The Washington Post:We’ve gone out to the sites, and we don’t find any oil. They didn’t? No oil plumes in the water? How do you miss a floating oil turd bigger than a quarter horse? If the tar ponies are riding up the beach, they had to be swimming in the water column. As the biologist Yogi Berra once said, “It’s amazing what you can see when you’re looking.” Two months before we got there, Zach Roberts (our man working under the name “Ronald” Roberts, fish expert) said this gunk was all over the place. So how had these biologists missed this? Badpenny and I discovered the problem: In February 2007, there had been an oil spill in Dr.


pages: 624 words: 127,987

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

Don’t continue to pour concrete into a bottomless pit—if it’s not worth the additional investment, walk away. You never have to earn back money in the same way you lost it. If the reward isn’t worth the investment required to obtain it or the risk, don’t invest. SHARE THIS CONCEPT: http://book.personalmba.com/sunk-cost/ 7 THE HUMAN MIND Ninety percent of this game is half mental. —YOGI BERRA, FORMER PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL PLAYER AND MALAPROPIST Now that we’ve covered the essentials of how businesses work, we’re going to shift gears into understanding how people work. Businesses are built by people for people. As we discussed in Value Creation and Value Delivery, if people didn’t have needs and wants, businesses wouldn’t exist.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Later he took electrocardiograms of wounded soldiers and watched the flickering needles describe the consequences of punctured lungs, shattered bones, buried bullets: a thousand more reasons not to go to Vietnam. But it was the Intrepid Four who pointed the way to Sweden. When Bill saw them on the cover of a magazine, he began plotting a journey north. (“Like Yogi Berra says,” reflected Bill, “when you come to a fork in the road…”) Another medic in his unit had the same impulse and acted first, selling his car and hitchhiking to Denmark. Bill intended to join him, but didn’t like what he found when he arrived. “He was something in the Copenhagen club scene,” he recalled.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

The first says it doesn’t matter how a company raises its money, and the second says it doesn’t matter whether it gives the money to shareholders. “The great thing about M&M,” University of Chicago professor James Lorie would jokingly tell his students in the 1970s, “is that nothing really matters.”19 Miller himself explained the papers’ significance like this: “The pizza delivery man comes to Yogi Berra after the game and says, Yogi, how do you want this pizza cut, into quarters or eighths? Yogi says, cut it into eight pieces. I’m feeling hungry tonight.”20 The M&M propositions were thus either breathtakingly bold or trivially obvious—or both. Their greatest significance was that they made it acceptable to wield deductive logic in the study of finance.


pages: 349 words: 134,041

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Brownian motion, business logic, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, disinformation, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass affluent, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Salesforce, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, technology bubble, the medium is the message, the new new thing, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, volatility smile, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Risk ‘savages’ appeared; in keeping with the defence theme, there were ‘body counts’. To lend a more scientific perspective, the speaker threw in some technical jargon – ‘risk regimes’, ‘the colonization of uncertainty’ and ‘risk management as anesthesia’. References to an odd collection of famous names – Mark Twain, Yogi Berra, Monty Python – abounded. The speaker confessed that his daily life was ‘technical’, ‘absurdly mathematical’ and ‘full of partial differential equations’. He confided to his audience that on weekends he was likely to read a book on ‘prime numbers’ or a ‘novel’. Balzac, Jane Austen and Italo Calvino were mentioned.


pages: 486 words: 132,784

Inventors at Work: The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions by Brett Stern

Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Build a better mousetrap, business process, cloud computing, computer vision, cyber-physical system, distributed generation, driverless car, game design, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart transportation, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the market place, value engineering, Yogi Berra

I had never taken something that already existed and thought, “I’m going to make a better one.” I never did that. Stern: What do you think are the skill sets needed for an inventor to be successful? Michelson: Before we get to a skill set, let’s get to personality or state of mind, or a way of thinking. You can’t be rigid, where you’re afraid of failing. Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” You have to be able to see. All the same things that Darwin observed were there for everybody else to see, but he saw them with a new eye of understanding. You have to give yourself permission to deconstruct things. I would say that’s probably the number-one thing: you have to be able to take things apart.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

The idea was simple: a crowd with diverse, independent opinions of equal voice will outperform most if not all individual experts at a variety of tasks when their opinions are aggregated to harness their collective wisdom. It’s an elegant theory that is, in large part, correct when you do the math of collective aggregation. But as Yogi Berra so eloquently opined, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” The only problem with Surowiecki’s thesis is that his book was written in 2004, the same year Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook. In the decade that followed, the Hype Machine systematically undercut the three fundamental assumptions of the wisdom of crowds.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

With the help of a former McKinsey colleague—the son-in-law of the Cardinals’ owner—Luhnow got a job as the team’s vice president for scouting and player development, a surprisingly important position for a newcomer with no formal background in baseball. Luhnow quickly signaled his commitment to analytics by hiring Sig Mejdal, a former blackjack dealer who had also worked as an engineer for Lockheed Martin and NASA. He changed careers after reading Moneyball. Mejdal’s description of modern baseball did not evoke memories of Casey Stengel or Yogi Berra. “You are going to need database, you are going to need persons with database skills, you are going to need servers, you are going to need analysts to analyze that data, and then you are going to need analysts or others with skills to present it to the decision makers.” Luhnow’s arrival upset baseball traditionalists.


pages: 470 words: 144,455

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier

Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, business process, butterfly effect, cashless society, Columbine, defense in depth, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, fault tolerance, game design, IFF: identification friend or foe, information security, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, macro virus, Mary Meeker, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Morris worm, Multics, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, pez dispenser, pirate software, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, slashdot, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, systems thinking, the payments system, Timothy McVeigh, Y2K, Yogi Berra

THE POINT OF THREAT MODELING When designing a security system, it is vital to do this kind of threat modeling and risk assessment. Too many system designers think of security design as a cookbook thing: mix in particular countermeasures— encryption and firewalls are good examples—and magically you’re secure. This never happens. Yogi Berra said:“You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going ’cause you might not get there.” Often security systems don’t protect against the threats that matter. Encrypting e-mail may protect the contents from eavesdropping, but does nothing to hide the fact that two people are communicating.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

No one said a transparent society would come without drawbacks, or challenges to the good judgment of twenty-first-century citizens. The classic Mayan civilization (now long extinct) had a superbly pampered class of brilliant astrological futurists. BRUTE STERLING I never make predictions, especially about the future. YOGI BERRA A Predictions Registry “The secrets of flight will not be mastered within our lifetime ... not within a thousand years.” This prognostication, singularly famous for its irony, was reportedly uttered in 1901 by none other than Wilbur Wright. We can presume he said it during a foul mood, after some temporary setback.


pages: 524 words: 146,798

Anarchy State and Utopia by Robert Nozick

distributed generation, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, means of production, Menlo Park, moral hazard, night-watchman state, Norman Mailer, Pareto efficiency, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, rent control, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, school vouchers, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Yogi Berra

For each person, so far as objective criteria of goodness can tell (insofar as these exist), there is a wide range of very different kinds of life that tie as best; no other is objectively better for him than any one in this range, and no one within the range is objectively better than any other.5 And there is not one community which objectively is the best for the living of each selection set from the family of sets of not objectively inferior lives. For our purposes at this point either of Ib2 or II will serve. Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsburg, Harry Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey Stengel, The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses, Einstein, Hugh Heffner, Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Baba Ram Dass, Gandhi, Sir Edmund Hillary, Raymond Lubitz, Buddha, Frank Sinatra, Columbus, Freud, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams, Thomas Edison, H.


pages: 507 words: 145,878

The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders by Connie Bruck

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial independence, fixed income, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, profit maximization, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, yield management, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

And at the Wickes deal’s closing dinner, held in the Garden Room at the plush Hotel Bel Air, one Drexel employee presented to Milken, Joseph and others framed copies of three prospectus covers, mounted side by side—a Wall Street triptych. The first was Salomon’s red herring; the second was the prospectus with Drexel and Salomon listed as co-managers; the third was Drexel’s. The inscription that ran across the bottom of the mounting read, “As Yogi Berra said, ‘It isn’t over ’til it’s over.’ ” 14 Sovereign Privileges IN FEBRUARY 1986, when Milken appeared before the money managers in Boston, speaking about the difference between perception and reality and ticking off his triumphs, he had begun by noting that he had seen pickets as he entered the building.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Clarke and Isaac Asimov, more visionary than most, were steeped in the transport-obsessed 1950s rather than the communication-obsessed 2000s. So in describing the world of 2100, I am bound to sound like somebody stuck in the world of the early twenty-first century, and make laughable errors of extrapolation. ‘It’s tough to make predictions,’ joked somebody, perhaps Yogi Berra: ‘especially about the future.’ Technologies I cannot even conceive will be commonplace and habits I never knew human beings needed will be routine. Machines may have become sufficiently intelligent to design themselves, in which case the rate of economic growth may by then have changed as much as it did at the start of the industrial revolution – so that the world economy will be doubling in months or even weeks, and accelerating towards a technological ‘singularity’ where the rate of change is almost infinite.


pages: 504 words: 147,660

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction by Gabor Mate, Peter A. Levine

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, corporate governance, drug harm reduction, epigenetics, gentrification, ghettoisation, impulse control, longitudinal study, mass immigration, megaproject, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, PalmPilot, phenotype, placebo effect, Rat Park, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), source of truth, twin studies, Yogi Berra

Being mentally in your business keeps me from being present in my own. I am separate from myself, wondering why my life doesn’t work.4 Partners, friends and family, whether despondently or optimistically trying to pressure the addict to change, would do well to remember the immortal words of Yogi Berra: “If the people don’t want to come to the ball game, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.” CHAPTER 34 There Is Nothing Lost: Addiction and the Spiritual Quest All problems are psychological, but all solutions are spiritual. THOMAS HORA, M.D. A barrier for many people when it comes to Twelve-Step work around addiction is Step Two, evoking a higher power: [We] came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.


pages: 600 words: 174,620

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.

anesthesia awareness, British Empire, classic study, conceptual framework, deskilling, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, sugar pill, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Yogi Berra

CHAPTER 3 LOOKING INTO THE BRAIN: THE NEUROSCIENCE REVOLUTION If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot, with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, and surrounded by darkness, more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere. —Ivan Pavlov You observe a lot by watching. —Yogi Berra In the early 1990s novel brain-imaging techniques opened up undreamed-of capacities to gain a sophisticated understanding about the way the brain processes information. Gigantic multimillion-dollar machines based on advanced physics and computer technology rapidly made neuroscience into one of the most popular areas for research.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

As their potential for economic growth has burgeoned in the last two decades, their voices have grown louder in international meetings. The World Trade Organization and Its Critics China and India refused to accept the 2008 round of trade negotiations conducted at Doha, capital city of Qatar, under the umbrella of the World Trade Organization. The breakdown in the Doha round looked a lot like Yogi Berra’s “déjà vu all over again.” The sight of nations jockeying for special privileges to the neglect of shared concerns brought back scenes from the 1920s. The depths of the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II had convinced Western nations to give up protective tariffs and accept restraints imposed by the Bretton Woods agreement.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Many CEOs fail in allocating capital because of their incentive structure, which is aligned to what they can do in the short term rather than what they should do for the long term. This is why Munger says, “Perhaps the most important rule in management is to get the incentives right.”5 In theory, stock options should align the interests of managers with shareholders. But as Yogi Berra said, “In theory, there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is.” Two aspects of stock options make them an ineffective way to incentivize management. First, they are a capital cost. For a manager with a fixed price option, retained earnings are “free-of-cost” capital.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

The rates of return to non-Japanese investors on their purchases of shares in Japanese firms were high since these investors benefited from the combination of the increase in the price of the stocks and the increase in the foreign exchange value of the Japanese yen. The bubble in Japan reached its crescendo at the end of 1989. Real estate prices seemed so high that the quip by the much quoted baseball star Yogi Berra that ‘It’s so expensive that no one can afford to live there’ seemed applicable. Banks developed one-hundred-year, three-generation mortgages. The incoming governor of the Bank of Japan was concerned that such high prices for homes would erode social harmony. A new central bank regulation instructed Japanese banks to limit the rate of growth of their real estate loans so that it would be no greater than the rate of growth of their total loans.


Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David Aronson

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, Black Swan, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mental accounting, meta-analysis, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, retrograde motion, revision control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Sharpe ratio, short selling, source of truth, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, systematic trading, the scientific method, transfer pricing, unbiased observer, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Box 2’s results are less variable than those of box 1. This is evidenced by box 2’s narrower clustering about its central value. Given the lower degree of sampling variation in box 2, it would be fair to say that we know the value of F-G 2 with greater certainty than we know F-G. What the Box Experiments Taught Us about Statistics Yogi Berra, former manager of the New York Yankees, said you can observe a lot just by looking. If he were a statistician, he might have said that you can learn a lot just by sampling. Even though a sample is only a portion of a larger universe (population), it can teach us a lot about that pop- Box 2 R E L A T I V E F R E Q U E N C Y 0.3 Box 1 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 f–g FIGURE 4.11 Relative frequency distributions compared. 0.8 0.9 1 186 METHODOLOGICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, STATISTICAL FOUNDATIONS ulation.


pages: 757 words: 193,541

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2 by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan

active measures, Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, continuous integration, correlation coefficient, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, delayed gratification, DevOps, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, Google Glasses, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intermodal, Internet of things, job automation, job satisfaction, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, level 1 cache, load shedding, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine readable, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, place-making, platform as a service, premature optimization, recommendation engine, revision control, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sorting algorithm, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The future is already here, Toyota Production System, vertical integration, web application, Yogi Berra

Describe how the ICS process could be applied to IT. 10. List the key concepts that go into an Incident Action Plan. 11. How would you attempt to convince your management of the necessity of conducting fire-drill exercises in your environment? Chapter 16. Monitoring Fundamentals You can observe a lot by just watching. —Yogi Berra Monitoring is the primary way we gain visibility into the systems we run. It is the process of observing information about the state of things for use in both short-term and long-term decision making. The operational goal of monitoring is to detect the precursors of outages so they can be fixed before they become actual outages, to collect information that aids decision making in the future, and to detect actual outages.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It is August 2015, and I am sitting in a conference room with the then St. Louis Park mayor Jeff Jacobs; the city manager, Tom Harmening; and the city’s chief information officer, Clint Pires. Jacobs had been mayor since 1999 and on the city council since 1991. He is an unusual mix of Andy Griffith, Machiavelli, and Yogi Berra. That is, he has learned a ton about politics and human behavior through the window of a small-town city council, and he is capable of condensing his wisdom into memorable one-liners that Yogi and Machiavelli would have admired. The local newspaper, the Sun Sailor, collected a few on December 9, 2015, to commemorate his retirement, including: On the city council, “Our job is to have seven people come together to disagree, then do it again the next week.”


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The most common reasons, however, had to do with the high value of the products in question, coping with volatile consumer demand, and an outright need for speed in production. The last one is also why LA has begun a slow descent into flyover country as far as cargo is concerned. Asian airlines in particular have learned to skip its tangle of runways and freeways in favor of direct flights to Dallas to drop off their laptops. It’s Yogi Berra logic: nobody lands there anymore; it’s too crowded. Orange County: The Battle of El Toro “Airports come in two sizes,” Rem Koolhaas wrote, “too big and too small.” But John Wayne Airport, nestled snugly in Orange County, was just right. Big enough for locals to enjoy the connections it offered but too small to really annoy anyone, it was a perfect fit for the O.C.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The Travelers/Citicorp juggernaut would use its huge balance sheet to make large loans to companies and leverage this to sell the clients a variety of other advisory services or financial products. The institution’s unparalleled reach would offer a one-stop-shop for individuals—payments, credit cards, mortgages, savings, and investment products. But as the baseball player Yogi Berra noted: “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is.” Synergies and cross-selling benefits failed to emerge. Competition limited CitiGroup’s gains. Other commercial banks built or bought investment banks to compete. i-Banks, the new buzzword for investment banks, shamelessly derivative of Apple’s ‘i’ products—particularly Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch (collectively dubbed MGM)—changed their business models to match the universal banks.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

At that point, we might begin to start breaking the vicious cycle with more effective interventions, including technological innovations to reduce stress, support parenting, manage consumer finances, and help individuals make better decisions. The first step toward eliminating poverty is to acknowledge that it doesn’t have to exist. A NEW NARRATIVE The future is always uncertain. The great American philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” But it was the American economist Frank Knight who taught us how to separate risk from uncertainty. Risk is measurable and quantifiable; uncertainty is the unknown unknowns. One of the great achievements of modern financial economics has been to push back against uncertainty, to convert the unknown unknowns into known and familiar quantities, to tame uncertainty and harness risk for our own purposes.


pages: 612 words: 179,328

Buffett by Roger Lowenstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cashless society, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, Jeffrey Epstein, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-coupon bond

Tycoons there had been, and also men of letters, but here, in one package, was a J. P. Morgan writing with the irreverence of Will Rogers. Buffett leavened the essays with cracker-barrel witticisms and nimble quotations (belying the notion that he was some sort of hick) from cultural icons such as Pascal, Keynes, Mae West, and Yogi Berra. But these were mere truffles. What set the essays apart was his knack for unbuttoning a complex subject and clearly explaining it. Through the early eighties one can discern three recurring themes. One was Buffett’s dread fear of inflation, inherited from his father. He seemed to have taken to heart Lenin’s dictum that the way to ruin capitalism was to ruin its money, and he doubted that politicians had the willpower to slow the printing press.


pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

The nearly eight years had been a dark comedy of stuttering progress, “and then two months later there’s a backsliding of it,” said Burris, who then put the city on notice that he and Chanin were considering receivership if real progress couldn’t finally be made. Before taking his seat to listen to what the city attorney or Chief Batts might say in their defense, Burris let his discontent be known by paraphrasing baseball legend Yogi Berra, as famous for his malapropisms as for his bat and glove: “I hope this isn’t déjà vu all over again.” * * * The Great Recession’s impact was like a second coming of Proposition 13. Oakland’s finances were decimated at a moment of great need for housing, jobs, and basic food security, and coming at a time when greater police accountability was being called for.


pages: 698 words: 198,203

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

Hence we get a school full of Susans and Steves in the 1960s and of Chloës and Dylans today. But then the next generation of parents will react to the hyperstevism or hyperdylanism by looking for a new new thing, sending the curves careening in yet another direction. The dynamic is reminiscent of Yogi Berra’s restaurant review: “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Baby-name advisors like Pamela Satran try to advise parents on categories of names on the horizon that are neither too common nor too outré—perhaps heroes’ last names, like Monet or Koufax, or color words, like Taupe or Cerulean.48 (Yogi, anyone?)


pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Therefore you must be prepared to defend yourself. Defense is an iffy matter even with technologies such as castle walls, the Maginot Line, or antiballistic missile defenses, and it is even iffier without them. The only option for self-protection may be to wipe out potentially hostile neighbors first in a preemptive strike. As Yogi Berra advised, “The best defense is a good offense and vice versa.” Tragically, you might arrive at this conclusion even if you didn’t have an aggressive bone in your body. All it would take is the realization that others might covet what you have and a strong desire not to be massacred. Even more tragically, your neighbors have every reason to be cranking through the same deduction, and if they are, it makes your fears all the more compelling, which makes a preemptive strike all the more tempting, which makes a preemptive strike by them all the more tempting, and so on.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

That's why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details) but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because exponential growth is ignored). The Six Epochs First we build the tools, then they build us. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN The future ain't what it used to be. —YOGI BERRA Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order. I'll discuss the concept of order in the next chapter; the emphasis in this section is on the concept of patterns. I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

A military’s doctrine then shapes everything it does, from how it trains soldiers and what type of weapons it buys to the tactics it uses to fight with them in the field. Doctrines also depend on a bit of prediction about the future. In a sense, doctrine is an “outline of how we fight, based on past experience and an educated guess about likely future circumstance.” Yogi Berra put it best: “If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.” Hence the stakes for choosing the right doctrine are huge. Technologies matter greatly in war, but so do the visions that shape the institutions that use them. A telling historic example comes from that same period between the world wars that Robert Bateman referred to.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

It sounds too good to be true, but in reality, it’s the ultimate in creating a portfolio that truly offers you peace of mind. For now let me show you three tools that can help you limit many of your investment risks and maximize your investment returns in a traditional investing format. The future ain’t what it used to be. —YOGI BERRA Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. —NIELS BOHR On March 2, 2009, Paul Tudor Jones told me that the market was hitting its absolute bottom. Prices would start rising again. Spring was coming. So I tweeted: By the way, it was the first time I ever tweeted any information on the potential direction of the stock market!


pages: 769 words: 224,916

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, forensic accounting, global village, haute couture, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intangible asset, Iridium satellite, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, low earth orbit, margin call, Mount Scopus, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Favor begat favor between these two governments during the late Cold War, and secret begat secret, a pattern of conduct that required an unusual measure of personal trust and understanding at the highest levels. Fahd’s visit to Washington was therefore of timely significance. Reagan was a master of the theatrical and ceremonial aspects of his office, and he prepared to put on a show. Up the White House driveway they strolled on the chilly night of February 11—Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees manager; Vice President George Bush; Linda Gray, star of Dallas, the television series about oil barons; Oscar Wyatt, the genuine Texas oil baron; the actress Sigourney Weaver; and Donald and Ivana Trump. “It’s exciting. It’s Americana. It’s Ronald Reagan,” joked Saturday Night Live comedian Joe Piscopo, who was also on the state dinner’s guest list.


pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

“From a public health point of view, and an animal health point of view, this virus is just getting a stronger and stronger grip on the region.”754 In a tone uncharacteristic of international policy institutions, the FAO wrote: “Over this bleak landscape sits a black cloud of fear that the virus might become adapted to enable human-to-human transmission and then spread around the globe.”755 The urgency and alarm among those tracking H5N1’s building momentum was palpable.756 “It’s like watching a volcano getting ready to erupt,” described a spokesperson of the World Organization for Animal Health (known as OIE, for Office Internationale des Epizooties).757 “We’re all holding our breath,” said Julie Gerberding, former head of the CDC.758 Two Minutes to Midnight When would the H5N1 pandemic strike? The experts were vague on that point, and “probably sooner rather than later,”759 “any time now,”760 “this year or next”761 were common refrains. Some wondered why it hadn’t happened already.762 “It’s tough to make predictions,” said Yogi Berra, “especially about the future.” Some attempted to take comfort in the fact that the virus had been in existence for almost ten years and hadn’t sparked a pandemic yet.763 Evidence suggests, though, that the 1918 virus was “smouldering” for at least eleven years before it went pandemic.764 Even if greater numbers of people started falling ill, the virus may still need to fine-tune its human appetite.


pages: 706 words: 237,378

Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn

airport security, Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, Columbine, digital rights, epigenetics, fear of failure, Higgs boson, impulse control, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, medical residency, mirror neurons, New Journalism, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, traumatic brain injury, Whole Earth Catalog, Yogi Berra

Our philosophy is that you are the world expert on your life, your body, and your mind, or at least you are in the best position to become that expert if you observe carefully. Part of the adventure of meditation is to use yourself as a laboratory to find out who you are and what you are capable of. As the legendary New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra once put it in his unique and charmingly quirky way, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” I The Practice of Mindfulness: Paying Attention 1 You Have Only Moments to Live Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Leading the way was George Herman “Babe” Ruth, who had joined the team in 1920 (from the Boston Red Sox, still the team’s archrivals). The original “Bronx Bomber,” Ruth hit the stadium’s first home run – soon enough, Yankee Stadium was known as “The House That Ruth Built.” Playing alongside Ruth, Lou Gehrig earned the nickname “The Iron Horse” by playing in 2130 consecutive games. Joe DiMaggio, “Yogi” Berra, Mickey Mantle, and Reggie Jackson also all wore the famous Yankee pinstripes. The Yankees won the World Series an amazing nineteen times between 1927 and 1962 and finished the twentieth century with three straight titles, but despite the largest payroll in baseball (nearly twice that of the team with the next highest), the Yankees haven’t won the World Series since 2000.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

The original “Bronx Bomber”, Ruth hit the stadium’s first home run – and soon enough, Yankee Stadium was known as “The House That Ruth Built”. Playing alongside Ruth, Lou Gehrig earned the nickname “The Iron Horse” by playing in 2130 consecutive games (a record that stood for 56 years); the championships began to roll in, even more so when Joe DiMaggio joined Gehrig on the team after Ruth’s retirement. “Yogi” Berra, Mickey Mantle, former single-season home run leader Roger Maris, Reggie Jackson and, more recently, Mariano Rivera were but a few other greats who also wore the famous Yankee pinstripes. The Yankees won the World Series an amazing nineteen times between 1927 and 1962 and finished the twentieth century with three straight titles; after a nine-year gap, they returned to the top in 2009.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Sydney time, when world financial markets open, the deutschemark trades against the dollar and the euro. The euro depreciates against the other major currencies. And when the German stock exchange rings its opening bell that morning, the screens display share prices in deutschmarks. It is a new start. “The future,” as Yogi Berra might have said, “ain’t what it used to be.” the future ain’t what it used to be 457 Epilogue L ogically, the euro could do no economic or political good. It could do a lot of harm. The warnings were sounded. It need not have been. It almost wasn’t. The rest followed. It could get worse, much worse.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

Whether or not he was right about quantum mechanics and the cosmos, his statement is certainly not true of the games people play in their daily lives. Life is not chess but backgammon, with a throw of the dice at every turn. As a result, it is hard to make predictions, especially about the future (as Yogi Berra allegedly said). But in a universe with any regularities at all, decisions informed by the past are better than decisions made at random. That has always been true, and we would expect organisms, especially informavores such as humans, to have evolved acute intuitions about probability. The founders of probability theory, like the founders of logic, assumed that they were just formalizing common sense.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

America was supposed to be the land of dynamism, but a number of the country’s advanced economic sectors were languishing, especially compared to how quickly Germany and Japan were developing under neo-imperial systems. Hoover understood that government had to establish a base level of coordination and standardization around novel technologies. Capital was stuck in Yogi Berra’s “Nobody goes there, it’s too crowded” contradiction: Investors were scared off by reasonable fears of free-riding on research and development, price competition, and a lack of standardization. No one wanted to be stuck holding the bag when the new rules came down. This is where the associative model came in: Hoover could provide not just physical infrastructure with water and power, but also the informational infrastructure new industries needed to become investable.


pages: 926 words: 312,419

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel

activist lawyer, business cycle, call centre, card file, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, job satisfaction, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero day

Everybody gets a kick out of feeling special. I think that’s one part of this game. I’ve never been a big star. I’ve never done anything outstanding. I feel I’ve been as good as I can be with the equipment I have. I played with Mickey Mantle and now I’m playing with Willie Mays. People always recognize them. Yogi Berra, people always recognize him. Yogi has a face you couldn’t forget. But for someone to recognize me! “I signed with the Cleveland Indians in 1958, with their farm club. Back and forth in the minors.” He was working on a master’s degree. A scout signed him up. “I told them I was twenty-one. I was really twenty-three.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

But most of the numbers were beside the point in deciding whether to expand, contract, hire, build, prosecute, assassinate, bomb, or arrest. Accounting, after all, is necessarily about the past. It is a story. Yet business and governmental and personal decisions are, of course, about the future, which usually is in important respects unknowable. As Yogi Berra, and Niels Bohr, said, “It’s hard to predict. Especially about the future.” What the modern fascination with charts, graphs, figures, and calculations does show, in other words, is that moderns especially admire prudence. It does not show that they always practice it. To suppose mistakenly that calculation is the same thing as practicing rationality might be called the “Max Weber rationality attribution error.”


pages: 1,073 words: 302,361

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyman Minsky, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, tail risk, time value of money, too big to fail, traveling salesman, two and twenty, value at risk, work culture , yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The fact that both credit-rating agencies had bestowed AAA ratings on $505.6 million—or 72.4 percent—out of the total $698.4 million of the mortgage-backed securities Goldman was selling in April 2006 no doubt conveyed a level of security to investors that probably never existed, especially since investors did not do their own detailed due diligence on the underlying mortgages but rather instead just relied upon the Goldman imprimatur and that of the ratings agencies to make their investment decisions. (Goldman’s similar behavior vis-à-vis the ratings agencies leading up to the Penn Central bankruptcy springs to mind; it’s déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.) By spring 2006, investors were probably not aware of the growing internal doubts of analysts at both S&P and Moody’s about the mortgage-backed securities they were rating. For instance, at a weeklong housing conference, held on Amelia Island, Florida, in April 2005, two S&P credit analysts noted that the housing market seemed to be getting a little frothy and that the financial risks to the industry were ratcheting up as housing prices skyrocketed and lending standards deteriorated.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The hype that accompanied the promotion of successive strategic fashions exaggerated the importance of the enlightened manager and played down the importance of chance and circumstances in explaining success. PART V Theories of Strategy CHAPTER 36 The Limits of Rational Choice In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. —Yogi Berra (also attributed to Albert Einstein) THIS SECTION is concerned with the possibility of strategic theory based on the insights of contemporary social sciences. We have already seen how apparently detached intellectual activity was the product of wider social forces, whether the effort put in by the RAND Corporation to develop new sciences of decision-making, the foundation grants that encouraged business schools to adopt these—and which the more sociologically inclined organizational theorists sought to resist—or else the impact of the radical thinking of the 1960s on the relationship between discourse and power.


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

Consequently, these shareholders filed some 950 petitions against the IRS in U.S. Tax Court, seeking to fight these new tax bills. As a result of ITT and the ITT board of directors being named a defendant in Herbst's original lawsuit, and then since Lazard had been added as a named defendant, Felix, Andre, and Tom Mullarkey all testified in the case. As Yogi Berra would say, it was deja vu all over again. Felix testified twice in the Herbst matter. On November 16, 1973--before the IRS's new ruling--he testified about the circumstances related to ITT's "sale" of the 1.7 million shares of the Hartford stock to Mediobanca. And once again, he stuck to his story of having no role whatsoever in the transaction between ITT and Mediobanca and that only Andre and Tom Mullarkey were even the slightest bit involved, and then only tangentially.


pages: 1,535 words: 337,071

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It would be natural to guess that the shared probability p in this mixed-strategy equilibrium would be 0.6, but this is not necessarily the case. Instead, p depends on the payoffs x and −y: following the reasoning we saw in Chapter 6, we need to choose p so that each player is indifferent between choosing Go 6As Brian Arthur notes, this latter possibility is a reflection of the same phenomenon that the baseball player Yogi Berra invoked when he quipped about a popular restaurant, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded” [26, 104]. 17.7. ADVANCED MATERIAL: NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES AND THE EL FAROL BAR PROBLEM545 and choosing Stay. This will ensure that no one has an incentive to deviate from randomizing between the two alternatives.


pages: 1,199 words: 332,563

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", bioinformatics, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, index card, Indoor air pollution, information retrieval, invention of gunpowder, John Snow's cholera map, language of flowers, life extension, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, speech recognition, stem cell, telemarketer, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Liggett also had what it called the “Cigarette League,” a team of Chesterfield-smoking ballplayers assembled purely for advertising purposes, starring pitcher Robin Roberts of the Phillies and other baseball greats. For the Perry Como Show and newspaper dailies, Liggett named a “Chesterfield Star Team” with Yogi Berra as catcher and Stan Musial, Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams in the outfield. “They’re all great ball players, and they all agree Chesterfield is a great cigarette.”2 Substantial sums were paid to teams for such purposes. Liggett in 1950, for example, paid the New York Giants $291,368 for the privilege of airing its games on the radio, plus another $214,829 for TV rights.


pages: 675 words: 344,555

Frommer's Hawaii 2009 by Jeanette Foster

airport security, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, Easter island, glass ceiling, gravity well, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, place-making, polynesian navigation, retail therapy, South China Sea, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

These areas are generally quieter and more residential than Waikiki, but they’re still within minutes of beaches, shopping, and all the activities Oahu has to offer. Waikiki Some say that Waikiki is past its prime—that everybody goes to Maui now. If it has fallen out of favor, you couldn’t prove it by me. Waikiki is the very incarnation of Yogi Berra’s comment about Toots Shor’s famous New York restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” When King Kalakaua played in Waikiki, it was “a hamlet of plain cottages . . . its excitements caused by the activity of insect tribes and the occasional fall of a coconut.” The Merrie Monarch, who gave his name to Waikiki’s main street, would love the scene today.


The Art of Computer Programming: Sorting and Searching by Donald Ervin Knuth

card file, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Fermat's Last Theorem, G4S, information retrieval, iterative process, John von Neumann, linked data, locality of reference, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, p-value, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, sorting algorithm, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

If we already have a RANK field in each node, for the linear list representation, this is precisely the left weight, and it is possible to keep track of the corresponding right weights as we move down the tree. However, it appears that the bookkeeping required for maintaining weight balance takes more time than Algorithm A, and the elimination of two bits per node is probably not worth the trouble. Why don't you pair 'em up in threes? — attributed to YOGI BERRA (c. 1970) Another interesting alternative to AVL trees, called -3 trees," was intro- introduced by John Hopcroft in 1970 [see Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman, The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1974), Chapter 4]. The idea is to have either 2-way or 3-way branching at each node, and to stipulate that all external nodes appear on the same level.


pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

If you can score tickets to a game, arrange to meet your friends at “the bat,” a 120-foot boiler stack in front of Gate 4, painted with the Louisville Slugger logo and Babe Ruth’s signature. Arrive early and go down to Monument Park (at field level) to see the plaques honoring Yankee greats like Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, and Mickey Mantle—and still have time to buy a hot dog and an ice-cold beer and find your seats. The team began back in 1903 (though they wouldn’t be called the Yankees until ten years later), but it was in January 1920 that they acquired Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox, an event that turned the tide for the till-then unremarkable team.