You’re a terrible liar, boy,” Rand called after us. “Is he right?” I asked quietly, once we’d put some distance between the guest cabin and us. “That I’m a terrible liar? No. I’m a fantastic liar.
...the characters are useful because of some quirks of our minds, yours and mine. A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (system 2) does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.
One fall day in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne
There's a simple, but oft-neglected lesson here: to sustain success, you have to be willing to abandon things that are no longer successful.
Honestly, I don't think I'm a good promoter. I spend almost zero time or effort asking new readers to sample or purchase my work. That's not the job of the author. We should write our best material and leave it up to readers to spread the word.
Ultimately, the first, best step in getting your work noticed is to write good work. If people don't engage in your writing, no amount of serialization or free downloads is going to matter. You have to write something worth reading, and often it take...
Google is my best friend and my worst enemy. It's fabulous for research, but then it becomes addictive. I'll have a character eating an orange, and next thing I'm Googling types of oranges, I'm visiting chat rooms about oranges, I'm learning the hist...
Let's be clear - for people like me, who are obsessed with story and for whom words are their medium, writing is the best job possible. I work hard, but I earn more than the national average wage while I play with my imagination, and for me, that's a...
I don't personally consider myself Dr. Doom. I call myself Dr. Realist, even though it's less exciting and more boring than being called Dr. Doom. If you are consistently saying 'the world is going to end,' who is going to listen to you?
The U.S. has been living in a situation of excesses for too long. Consumers were out spending more than their income and the country was spending more than its income, running up large current-account deficits. Now we have to tighten our belts and sa...
In February of 1996, about six months after I created eBay, I started receiving a spate of complaints. Everyone was complaining about each other. I felt very much like I was a parent who had to adjudicate the brothers beating each other up.
News organisations that have been around a while have a lot of traditions and ways of doing things that may have served them for many years but perhaps make them less flexible in the digital era. As an entrepreneur, it just makes more sense to start ...
Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income i...
Looking back, it made no sense for my college friends and me to distance ourselves from the hard-won achievements of earlier feminists. We should have cheered their efforts. Instead, we lowered our voices, thinking the battle was over, and with this ...
If you think back to the fight over drones, when I was proud to be standing shoulder to shoulder with Rand Paul filibustering for 13 hours, that was viewed as a fringe issue, as a quixotic issue, and yet millions of Americans engaged, spoke up, got o...
What I'm pushing for is an economic discipline that will be closer to other social sciences; in particular, we should be more pragmatic about the methods that we are using instead of pretending that we have our own scientific apparatus with very soph...
When you are an entrepreneur, you have founded your own firm, it is so easy to find that you exist - you are the main shareholder of your company; it is very easy to look at the stock market position of your company to know how rich you are.
[Capitalism assumed] that from the beginning all men are equal. If that were so everyone would be equipped with the same working power, the same education and, above all, the same economic assets … each person would [then] have only himself to blam...
In the 40 years I've been working as an economist and investor, I have never seen such a disconnect between the asset market and the economic reality... Asset markets are in the sky, and the economy of the ordinary people is in the dumps, where their...
My view is that the U.S. market will eventually join the emerging markets on the downside because if you take a bearish view about emerging economies, you cannot be too optimistic about the U.S. because for many U.S. corporations, 50 percent or more ...
I can't speak for them, of course, but I believe that most economists would accept the view that, while you sometimes can make a score by sheer luck, you can't do it constantly, unless you're willing to put the resources in.
