Resilience, timing, adaptation - these are the three pillars upon which the emergent properties of interacting systems rest. When the systems are the economy and the environment, understanding of the relationships among these concepts is crucial. This volume does a better job of explaining how to manage both money and nature to ensure humanity's long-term future than any other work I know of. Read and reflect.

The global financial system consists of firms in the financial services sector - banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and the like - and various governmental agencies who are charged with regulating these firms.

I do not believe that there is any person, method, or tool that can consistently and reliably predict specific human events, X- or otherwise.

The process of globalization has now interconnected almost everything ranging from financial markets to transport networks to communication systems in a huge system that no one really understands.

What distinguishes a mathematical model from, say, a poem, a song, a portrait or any other kind of "model," is that the mathematical model is an image or picture of reality painted with logical symbols instead of with words, sounds or watercolors.

I don't think the emergence of a superhuman intelligence would be at all catastrophic but much more likely to be beneficial - just as long as we don't start trying to interfere with it!

From the 1990s onward, the financial sector created a vast array of instruments designed to separate investors from their money, financial derivatives of an ever-increasing level of complexity. At some point, this complexity reached a point where even the creators of the derivatives themselves didn't understand them.