The Ledger, every show

“I am not really a great believer in the hypothesis that there's an awful lot we can learn from history about our own age, because our own age is so different in so many ways”

“The national institutions probably play a relatively secondary role. Quite frankly, you know, if you put a gun to my head, I would say what happened, happened despite the best efforts of these states, not thanks to them.”

“Climate change cannot be solved by any means except technology, because a political solution is clearly not going to happen.”

“The evidence does not support that there's any danger. This whole notion about frankenfoods is completely made up”

“Out of that came our modern world. Out of that came every technological advance that made a big difference in electricity, in textiles, in steel, in, you know, in transportation, in medicine, you name it. It came all out of those interactions.”

“We are mis-measuring growth, or to put it slightly different, we're over-measuring inflation, because that, those two things boil down to the same thing, and we've known this for a long time, but it turns out the process is getting worse and worse, simply beca…”

“What made progress possible in this market for ideas is that it was a competitive market, and one thing economists know, competitive markets, by and large, work better than uncompetitive markets, and what is critical in understanding About the European system …”

“Internet or no internet, a disproportionate number of them come from a dozen institutions such as Caltech, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, you know, and Northwestern places like that.”

“The last, I think, 20, 25 years, almost all of the major breakthroughs have occurred by people coming in with ideas from psychology or from mathematics. And basically introducing these into economics.”

“If any nation is going to decide to not innovate because they like stability, they will end up like 19th century China.”

“The whole GDP accounting system that we have today was designed for an economy that produced wheat and steel.”

“Now, what is true for steam engines is essentially true across the board. Knowledge. Builds technology, and technology builds knowledge, and that synergy between these two sort of different aspects of human knowledge is what drives essentially our modern econo…”

“Skepticism and contestability become essentially the keywords of intellectual activity, and that's still true today.”

“Much of the knowledge created at that time is created by single individuals. There's not that much collaboration, you know, co-authorship, and these are multiple names on papers and books that we see today, that wasn't very much, that was quite uncommon in tho…”

“The reason that trust emerges is because that everybody knows that if you publish something or you, some discovery, some, Mathematical theorem that you have proven, or some planet you've discovered, or some new species that you found, that others will take, wi…”

“The way my university and any other university gives tenure is they look at your reputation. That's how these things are being decided. And so Joe Blow has the incentive To publish as much as he can, because that's how he gains a reputation. And so everything …”

“What happens in many fields is that they tend very quickly to reach a situation in which progress becomes rather incremental, and that people basically take the sense of, well, what we know is basically all there is to know, and so we can sort of make little s…”

“And I think our own age is going to have, go through a similar thing as climate change becomes more and more the central issue that the human race is coping with.”

“What's the contribution of Wikipedia to GDP? Well, it's nothing, because here every time you click on it, you're not charged.”