As a piece of travel literature alone, 'The Ends of the Earth' succeeds in providing a tangible sense of the sweaty, smelly reality of many exotic points on the map, with glimpses of their cruelty but also, occasionally, of beauty and human kindness. As a piece of analysis, it is deeply thought-provoking.

The nation will continue to be a central pole of identification, even if more and more nations come to share common economic and political forms of organization.

Neoclassical economics ... has uncovered important truths about the nature of money and markets because its fundamental model of rational self-interested human behavior is correct about 80% of the time.

To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard

China is never going to be a global model. Western system is really broken in some fundamental ways, but the Chinese system is not going to work either. It is a deeply unfair and immoral system where everything can be taken away from anyone in a split second.

It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master

If networks are to be more efficient...this will come about only on the basis of a high level of trust and the existence of shared norms of ethical behavior between network members