[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.

The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.

We should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn't know in advance who we'd be.

The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.

Yes, over the centuries economic progress has reduced some gross disparities - modern Americans are relatively unlikely to simply starve to death (though it can happen), so in that sense the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the question isn't whether society is, in some sense, more equal than it was in 1900. It's whether it is radically more unequal than it was in 1970. And of course it is.

Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power.

But where will the Fed find another bubble?