Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe.

I sometimes call Donald Trump the placebo president. He will talk a big game, but for domestic policy I think change remarkably little.

Social systems proceed by (usually) covering up the brutalities upon which they are based. The doctor doesn't let you get to his door and then turn you away, rather his home address is hard to find. The government handcuffs you so they don't have to shoot you trying to escape. And so on.

In most of the world, breakfast is an important meal.

The right wing will be identified with the monied class, even when the left often has more money. And the left wing will be identified as the whiners, even though the right at times whines as much or more. You might say that both sides are monied, high human capital whiners, on the whole.

Unintended Consequences is full of substance, it is one of the must-read books of the year, and once I finish it I will be giving it a second read through right away.

Real cultural diversity results from the interchange of ideas, products, and influences, not from the insular development of a single national style.

What I would like to vote for is a candidate that is socially liberal, a fiscal conservative, broadly libertarian with a small l but sensible and pragmatic and with a chance of winning. Thats more or less the empty set.

I'm not optimistic about reform in many, if any, policy areas at all. I think we'll make further progress by inventing new things that aren't much regulated yet and outracing bad policy. I look at so many policy areas - regulation, regulatory reform, health care reform - it's all failing, we're not making improvements, we're going backwards.

The lesson about food is that the most predictable and the most orderly outcomes are always not the best. They are just easier to describe. Fads are orderly. Food carts and fires aren't. Feeding the world could be a delicious mess, full of diverse flavors and sometimes good old-fashioned smoke.

Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self-image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them.

Apart from the seemingly magical Internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953... The wonders portrayed in 'The Jetsons,' the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass... Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down.

Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre.

People feel better because Donald Trump says all kinds of things no one else would say and we get certain tendencies out of our system. So if attacking immigrants, say, is a substitute for doing something worse, there's at least a scenario under which that's a better alternative than something else that might have happened.

Newton expected no money from establishing his originality but rather desired recognition for his excellence.