There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanThe danger is that when we jump too quickly to the solution, not only is the floor littered with the inventions that never worked, but we risk designing solutions that never fit the problem.
Rape is one of the oldest weapons of war and it remains so to this day. For too long, it has been viewed as an 'unfortunate' side effect of war. But really, it is a tactic. The truth is that stable societies are built on the backs of women.
The important thing which central government can do is to promise, without reservation, that there will be no new taxation and 'emergency' taxation- and that they will focus on collecting existing taxes by expanding the tax-base to those who are evading taxes.
When you innovate under constraints like this, you go to a different level- that's the opportunity India provides.
There is very little that matters more in democracy, than truth. I think cynicism is dangerous - that's a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. That's a very dangerous position, and I think we've got to fight cynicism.
I think behavioural economics has now become an accepted part of the thinking on markets- it's generally accepted that people's decision making is heavily influenced by emotional state and various other behavioural biases in comparison to previous models that assumed rational decision making in the markets. The markets and individual investors are driven by what you could call 'irrational considerations' and emotions play an important role in that.
The world lacks creative imagination when it comes to mother nature- we believe that we have the power to bend nature to our desires and forget that we're vulnerable. Nature is a combination of biology, physics and chemistry- they are collectively much stronger at bending the world than we are.
In life, we all take various risks- not knowing how serious an outcome will be when we start. For so many things we do, we have to take a risk on someone else's word, with only their judgement calculating what the risk will be to us.
The people who started working at Chobani... the minute they had a job, the minute they started working, that's when they lost the sense of being a refugee and became part of the community. That was the moment they started to regain their dignity and became independent.
HIV prevalence among injecting drug users ranges from 20-40% in some countries, and more than 40% in many others. If we estimate the number of injecting drug users worldwide as 60 million, it means that around 3 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS because of this dangerous mode of transmission.
We like to think of data as being objective, but the answers we get are often shaped by the questions we ask. When those questions are biased, the data is, too.
There's an innate tendency in human-beings to sort ourselves by how much we want power. Some of us don't want it at all, some of us are absolutely obsessed with it. The interaction between the individual and the system is therefore critical.