Nothing fails like success, because we do not learn anything from it. We only learn from failure, but we do not always learn the right things from failure. If there is a failure of expectations, that is, if the messages that we receive are not the same as those we expected, we can make three possible inferences.

Economics has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.

The trouble with taxonomic boxes is... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.

There is something, however humble, which can properly be called skill among those who recognise themselves as economists.

Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.

The social system tends to be dominated by images... especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal.

DNA has been aptly described as the first three-dimensional Xerox machine.