found a page of good quotes a while back, never got around to posting them here tho:
"The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better."
--Matt Ridley
"If fertility drops much below 2.1 babies per woman, the population will shrink unless it is offset by higher immigration. For this reason, a demographic cloud hangs over China. It may be 'the first country to grow old before it grows rich.' ... Its fertility rate is below two and its working-age population will start to decline around 2015."
--Greg Ip
"Over a 15-year stretch ending in 2006, General Motors (NYSE: GM ) poured $55 billion into its workers' pension plan, compared to only $13 billion that it paid out in dividends."
--Roger Lowenstein
"New Jersey boasts the highest percentage of passport holders (68%); Delaware (67%), Alaska (65%), Massachusetts (63%), New York (62%), and California (60%) are close behind. At the opposite end of the spectrum, less than one in five residents of Mississippi are passport holders, and just one in four residents of West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas."
--Richard Florida
"Worldwide, there are now as many people overweight as malnourished (1 billion)."
--Charles Kenny
"In manufacturing, the market price is set by the smartest guy with the best, cheapest production process. In [stock] markets, the price is set by the dumbest guy with the most money to lose."
--William Heyman
"The United States, with income per capita of $29,000 and annual health care expenditures per head of $5,711, sees a life expectancy of seventy-seven years. Compare this to Costa Rica, where annual income per head is $6,500, annual health expenditures per capita is $305, and life expectancy is seventy-nine years."
--Charles Kenny
"Sudanese people live in unspeakable poverty, yet come to the U.S. and remark on how miserable Americans' lives are. All we do is work. No time for family, friends, or social gatherings."
--Adapted from the documentary God Grew Tired of Us
"In school they give you a question and ask you to find an answer. In the real world the answers are everywhere -- the Internet, calculators, history books, reference manuals. The trick is asking the right questions."
--Adapted from speech by Conrad Wolfram
"A recent study found that the iPod -- a nearly ubiquitous device -- has created 13,920 jobs in the United States, including engineering and retail. That's a pretty small number."
--Tyler Cowen
"Small government is better than big government, but size is less important than quality. For example, Sweden's government spends more than half of gross domestic product while Mexico's spends only a quarter of its GDP. But Swedish government is efficient and honest while Mexico's is inefficient and rife with corruption. That's one reason Sweden is rich and Mexico is poor."
--Greg Ip
"The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich."
--Nassim Taleb
"So [government] spending [in 2010] was $186 billion higher than if we'd stuck to the [2000-2007] trend, and revenue was $681 billion lower. In other words, the giant deficit is mainly the result of the collapse in tax receipts brought on by the recession, not the increase in spending. Nice to know, huh?"
--Justin Fox
"That what is self-evident to one person can be seen as silly by another should give us pause about the reliability of common sense as a basis for understanding the world."
--Duncan Watts
"Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas."
--Edward Glaeser
"One classic paper compared the effects of right-to-work laws on factory jobs in neighboring counties, on either side of a right-to-work border. It found that manufacturing grew 23.1% faster between 1947 and 1992 on the anti-union side of the divide."
--Edward Glaeser
"Don't have $7.5 million? Most American millionaires wouldn't define you as rich. Of the 1000 respondents in a survey by Fidelity Investments, all with at least $1 million in investable assets, 42% said they do not feel rich. In 2009, when the economy was worse, 46% reported not feeling rich."
--Zoe Fox
"By the age of 3, children from wealthier households hear, on average, about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. The ratio is reversed in households on welfare."
--Jonah Lehrer
"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
--John Kenneth Galbraith
"In 2009, economists Emmanuel Saez, Joel Slemrod and Seth Giertz concluded raising [tax] rates on the rich by 1 percent may cause them to report 0.1 percent to 0.4 percent less taxable income."
--Greg Ip
"Paying Kim Kardashian $10,000 to tweet about a product may well buy less buzz than paying 10,000 ordinary Twitter users $1 each."
--Chris Chabris
"If you manage a team of 10 people, it's quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that you'd be associated with that kind of incompetence."
--Ben Horowitz
"Between 1980 and 2000, financial industry profits rose from $32.4 billion to $195.8 billion ... and the financial sector's share of all domestically produced profits went from 19 percent to 29 percent."
--John Cassidy
"Don't believe that 'customer is always right' stuff. ... ING Direct has built the fastest-growing bank in America by saying no. When customers ask for a credit card, the answer is no. When they ask for an online brokerage, the answer is no. When they ask if they can open an account with a million dollars, the answer is no."
--Jason Fried
Comments, thoughts on any of those?
Full list is here:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/04/15/50-fascinating-things-ive-read-lately.aspx
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Originally Posted by Dødherre Mørktre: