Wisdom in fragments

Race and guns, both of which have conspired not only to take the life of a teenager, but to make that killing entirely permissible. I can't look an African-American parent in the eye for thinking about what they must tell their sons about what can happen to them on the streets of their country.

Creator of The Wire, acclaimed HBO crime drama series

Trying to figure out how we fit into the cosmos is old, it's a basic human question.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

Although, today, the universe appears more bio-friendly than it ever was. That doesn't mean it is inhabited. We still have to prove that.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

What makes SETI different today is that instead of the verb "to believe" we're trying to use the verb "to explore". We want to see what's actually out there instead of just believing what someone tells us is out there.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

There is a naïve form which doesn't recognise the bubble, and thinks that real-estate will go up forever. There is then a second order overconfidence where someone recognises a bubble but feels they will escape it when other people don't.

Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for Behavioral Economics Research

One of the sources of overconfidence in our ability to forecast the future is the great ease with which we find explanations for the past. That's a very significant mechanism that produces overconfidence.

Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for Behavioral Economics Research

Many entrepreneurs are deluded about their odds of success, that evidence is very clear. This creates problems… Should a government subsidise entrepreneurs who greatly over-estimate their chances of success?

Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for Behavioral Economics Research

You cannot understand entrepreneurial activity without understanding optimism. Research has shown that optimism and overconfidence in individuals is directly linked to their engagement in entrepreneurial activity.

Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for Behavioral Economics Research

Digital currency shows that anything can be money. We have become accustomed to see money as paper or pieces of gold, but in truth it could also be stones, grain, wood, cigarettes or complex computer codes.

Bubbles are driven by people piling into ideas now, that they think will make them lots and lots of money in the future. The more people that pile in, the more quickly innovation can spread... But if the capital is misallocated? then when the money meets common sense, you get a bust.

There is nothing really so bad about a recession. A recession is very much an economy pausing for breath to re-evaluate where it stands and to assess where to go next.

What crises actually do is expose the underlying fragility and structural flaws within an economy and society. Some of this is endemic – financial markets are fragile because they are giant pools of sentiment and leverage at their heart.

We always think of every crisis as being somehow different and unique to us. That is human myopia. The reality is that the perennial pattern we see is universal and immemorial.

Despite huge and on-going technological advances in electronic transactions technologies, it has remained surprisingly durable, even if its major uses seem to be buried in the world underground and illegal economy.

Economist & Harvard Professor; Former IMF Chief Economist

Another important argument for maintaining the status quo is that eliminating a core symbol of the monetary regime could disrupt common social conventions for using money, possibly in unexpected ways.

Economist & Harvard Professor; Former IMF Chief Economist