Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.

People in the voting booth are not purely rational creatures any more than they're purely rational creatures outside the voting booth.

The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.

The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can't go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.

Icelandic people are inbred. And they have a sense of themselves as genetically special, and a history of risk-taking because they make their living on the high seas fishing. Assets generally rose in value during this period, and so it looked like they actually knew what they were doing.

People were paid lots of money to make stupid decisions, people in big banks, and when people are paid to be stupid they'll be stupid. The question was, did they know they were being stupid or were they just stupid? I think you need to take it on a case by case basis. There was some sinister activity, but I think by and by it was people being incentivised to do the wrong thing.