Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time.
~ Jim Collins, Good to Great
Category Archives: 0747 – Quote Unquote
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Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies only the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive.
~ Anton Chekhov
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Compared with their European counterparts, both American political parties are strange beasts: no members, open primaries and a seemingly unlimited access to private funds. To inhabitants of the Old World, they seem more corporate brand than mass organization.
~ Anton Jäger via The New York Times
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Some research has cited the Antonine Plague as part of a vicious cycle that hastened Rome’s long fall. Food shortages, internal migrations, and overcrowding had already signaled a slippage in imperial power, and created a fertile environment for disease. The pandemic, in turn, spread panic and left behind mistrust, weakening faith in civic and religious authorities.
~ Vann Newkirk via The Atlantic
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Financialization has made American businesses less resilient, less innovative and less competitive. It has been a major cause of slow wage growth and rising inequality. It has fueled the loss of manufacturing jobs across the heartland.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
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What happens on the imperial level also happens at the local level, within the United States and the Western European societies that make the rules of globalization. Non-technocrats, whether they are the resentful members of the old working class or just people wisecracking about the progressive pieties of corporate human resource managers, are not going to be permitted to tangle up the system with their demands.
~ Christopher Caldwell
via This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time
published by The New York Times on November 28, 2024
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A recurrent phenomenon among California governors, who tend to run glamorous, is playing against type. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man once known for toting a bazooka, turned himself into a sober-suited policy wonk. Jerry Brown, a onetime figure of “pop politics,” emerged as a curmudgeon.
~ Nathan Heller via The New Yorker
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The capitalists driving financialization and promoting its results have become capitalism’s worst enemy. Every consumer and every worker in the United States feels the effects.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
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Measurement doesn’t abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting—of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts—signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. Over time, that intention matters. It’s one way a republic earns the right to be believed in.
~ Josh Tyrangiel via The Atlantic
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Economic theory as derived from Adam Smith assumes first that homo economicus acts with perfect optimality on complete information, and second that when many of the species homo economicus do that, their actions add up to the best possible outcome for everybody. Neither of these assumptions stands up long against the evidence.
~ Donella Meadows
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