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" In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Risks
Safety
Help
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" I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged. "
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" Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete. "
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" Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it. "
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" A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation. "
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" I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis. "
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" Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. "
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" We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body. "
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" The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what they were doing. "
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" Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain. "
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" Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right. "
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" I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush. "
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