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The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.

Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Men
Teaches
Wise
Teach
History
Doesn
Anything
Thing

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People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.
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What's fun is watching actors of that calibre bring them to life. It's incredible. Christian Bale spent a day with the character he plays and after my year of being with him I couldn't have generated the same view of him. They have a different way of looking at people, it's fascinating to watch.
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You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before.
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In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.
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Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .
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The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.
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He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.
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It's such a pain in the ass to write a book, I can't imagine writing one if I'm not interested in the subject.
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The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.
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I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.
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As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.
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The incentives are still rotten, and people are still paid to do things they shouldn't be doing. The reforms did not really address the incentives, the system is still dysfunctional and there are still behavioural issues that need to be addressed.
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I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.
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If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it.
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In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.
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I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.
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All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers.
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In Wall Street now, you have to hide what you're doing. It's more fun when you don't have to do that. But I don't think its sense of purpose has changed at all.
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Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors, including teachers' attitudes. Moreover, girls avoid situations in which failure is likely, whereas boys approach such situations as a challenge, indicating that failure differentially affects self-esteem.
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Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions.
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