Category Archives: book
2009 book: “Contemporary higher education is…an absurdly expensive, time-consuming way to guarantee intellectual and personality traits that could be measured far more easily, cheaply and reliably.”
From 2009 book Spent — Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior:
Contemporary higher education is…an absurdly expensive, time-consuming way to guarantee intellectual and personality traits that could be measured far more easily, cheaply and reliably by other means. Thorstein Veblen explained most of this perfectly clearly in his 1914 book The Higher Learning in America, but, [...]
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The Big Short, by Michael Lewis: “A smaller number of people — more than ten, fewer than twenty — made a straightforward bet against the entire multi-trillion-dollar subprime mortgage market and, by extension, the global financial system. In and of itself it was a remarkable fact: The catastrophe was forseeable, yet only a handful noticed.”
From The Big Short:
The thing Eisman had found was indeed a goldmine, but it wasn’t true that no one else knew about it. By the fall of 2006, Greg Lippman had made his case to maybe 250 big investors privately, and to hundreds more at Deutsche Bank sales conferences or on Deutsche Bank conference calls. [...]
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2010 book: “Unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril.”