Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.

And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.

The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.