“I share Harford’s deep commitment to figuring out what’s true. His calls for keeping an open mind, for being curious about scientific questions, results, and numbers, for carefully noticing your emotions on a topic – all supremely useful advice from which most of us can benefit. Abandoning or doubting all statistics you encounter is not…
“The book, while scary and disheartening, is truth-seeking and ultimately optimistic. Ritchie doesn’t come to bury science; he comes to fix it. ‘The ideals of the scientific process aren’t the problem,’ he writes on the last page, ‘the problem is the betrayal of those ideals by the way we do research in practice.'” ~ Joakim…
“Business responses to corona have shown us that unused items – from chairs and tables to urinals – still have value; they are still in use, even when nobody seems to be occupying them. Most importantly, government spending has little ability to raise that utilization. For this age-old economic fallacy, free lunches remain elusive.” ~…
“Lindbeck was a great economist and public voice of economic sanity. He will be sorely missed.” ~ Joakim Book
“The single largest factor for why Sweden had it much worse than its Nordic neighbors during corona is the ‘dry tinder’ hypothesis. We are sensitive about borrowing the dry tinder metaphor for the persons of human souls, but the metaphor is clarifying: Maybe a country has more forest fires this year than its neighbors because…
“A government strong enough to assign and enforce private property rights in remote areas wouldn’t have a problem with (excessive) deforestation in the first place. A government weak enough – or uninterested enough – that it’s unable to do so, couldn’t credibly abstain from chopping down trees, or promise that its citizens won’t do so…
“Nature may be pristine, but nature is not friendly. With climate change making nature even less secure, we would do well to let technology and global economic growth protect us. With wealth and technology, we can both tame it and protect against its worst excesses.” ~ Joakim Book
“It’s refreshing to read an account of early Bitcoin – not the programming, the cryptography, or the scandals, but the dreamy futurists and their financiers.” ~ Joakim Book