In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb.

A successful economy depends on the proliferation of the rich, on creating a large class of risk-taking men who are willing to shun the easy channels of a comfortable life in order to create new enterprise, win huge profits, and invest them again.

Some economists became obsessed with market efficiency and others with market failure. Generally held to be members of opposite schools-freshwater and saltwater, Chicago and Cambridge, liberal and conservative, Austrian and Keynesian-both sides share an essential economic vision. They see their discipline as successful insofar as it eliminates surprise-insofar, that is, as the inexorable workings of the machine override the initiatives of the human actors.

Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities.

The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.

Capitalism begins with giving.

All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms.