Noah

"Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone's inventor, unsuccessfully promoted an alternative that outdid even hello for nautical implications, answering his phone calls with a hearty AHOY! (This tidbit opens up in me a great deep pool of longing for a pop-cultural world that might have been: Ahoy Kitty pencil cases, Jim Morrison crooning "Ahoy, I love you, won't you tell me your name," Renée Zellweger shutting up Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire with a tearful "You had me at ahoy!") But it was Thomas Edison who won the day (or at least claimed the day in hindsight), suggesting the old ferry-hail-whoa-there as being most suitable, writing to a business partner, "I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away."" - Noah

"Ever-increasing choice was supposed to mean the end of the blockbuster. It has had the opposite effect" - Noah

"He writes, "The question of what a good job looks like – of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honoured – is more open now than it has been for a long time." The answer for him doesn't lie in the wholesale re-creation of an industrial class, making things, but from the fact that buildings and durable machinery (cars not toasters) will always need to be repaired, perhaps even increasingly as western societies become poorer and more frugal. The mistake of "the pundit class" was to lump manual skills and manufacturing together under the same blue-collar label and then "intone their requiem". The result is scarcity, while governments on both sides of the Atlantic persist in the belief that the best way forward, in Crawford's words, is to get "every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle" where they deal in on-screen abstractions and confine meaningful human contact to office bonding weekends." - Noah

"Yes. However, there is no law that obliges one to follow the recommendations of a quantitative model that is not appropriate to the context. Second, ignoring the context can be a good thing because the context of the decision is irrelevant. A quantitative model often captures the essence of a decision, say, the choice between a gamble and a sure thing. It does not matter whether the context is the stock market, a medical diagnosis or wildcatting. This allows for the transfer of insight from one setting to another." - Noah

"What do you call a financier in search of the iron laws of human behaviour? Answer: someone with a bad case of “physics envy”." - Noah