Wisdom in fragments

People often say to me, 'You must be so pleased with the effects your work has had.' But the daily feeling is frustration. There's much more to do. For kidney transplantation, I could tell you about victory after victory in a war we're losing -- because the shortage of transplants is growing rather than shrinking, as diabetes and hypertension become an epidemic. There's so much to do, so little time, and it's so hard to be persuasive.

Robert Edwards won the 2010 Nobel Prize for IVF. By then, millions of children had been born through it. On the very day his Nobel was announced, the Vatican said giving him the prize was 'completely out of order'. Same person, same achievement, same day -- celebrated as a saviour by some, condemned as a murderer by others. That is what a real moral controversy looks like. It doesn't dissolve, even after the technology has changed millions of lives.

There's an Overton window of policies you can make, but it's a wider window than the policies you can run your political campaign on. It's more a matter of legislators than politicians -- even though they're the same people.

The Red Crescent sheik said: 'That would just be giving his life back. We could do that.' A WHO official, told that the same Filipino patient would have died without our exchange, exclaimed, 'He should be dead!'

We allow firefighters to risk their lives to save others, and we honour them for it. We didn't allow people to test vaccines that way.

Money allows you to deal with anonymous other people, not just your kin. There are things we do in families that we would find objectionable if they were transactions.

Banning a market in which some people nevertheless want to participate may be the first step in designing the illegal black market that will emerge.

It's quite hard to effectively ban something in Europe that's available legally in California. Often bans that are porous put up barriers that primarily affect the poor more than the rich.

We wouldn't like there to be any heroin in society, but there's plenty of heroin. So our discussion can't just concern our moral feelings about drug addiction. It has to involve our consequential feelings about prisons, overdose deaths, and the effect on communities. You can't escape consequences when you talk about the world.

A repugnant transaction has fans as well as foes. When I call something repugnant, I'm not saying I oppose it, or that you should -- only that it has opponents who raise objections primarily on moral grounds.

There are plenty of reasonable, moderate, reformist, liberal leaders who just don’t quite know what to do. Our book ideally will help them make that choice. That is my hope.

Not only are incomes being lost — a sense of community, a sense of pride, a sense of belonging has also been lost. Those things clearly matter for human wellbeing. We’re just not very good at measuring them.

It is the job of the prime minister or the president to persuade people that we are all in it together, and that if you fall behind, we will lend you a hand.

We have the technological means to deal with climate change. We have the technological means to deal with pandemics. This is not a technical problem. It is mostly a political problem. If we get our politics under control, the rest is fun and games.

Economic growth is a means. The goal must be something else. It must be shared prosperity. It must be happier lives. It must be communities in which we all feel that we belong. It must be mutual respect. Those are ends.

One interesting way to break the sunk cost is to think about the cost of staying to other people. You might be willing to absorb the abuse yourself — but are you willing to put your family through the effects of your staying?