To get a person's real opinion, ask what she thinks everyone else believes... If people truly hold a particular belief, they are more likely to think that others agree or have had similar experiences. [People] tend to assume that other people have had life histories at least somewhat similar to their own. When we talk about other people, we are often talking about ourselves, whether we know it ourselves.

Economics is sometimes associated with the study and defense of selfishness and material inequality, but it has an egalitarian and civil libertarian core that should be celebrated.

Real cultural diversity results from the interchange of ideas, products, and influences, not from the insular development of a single national style.

Here's the positive scenario: that something has been going wrong in American society. You see it in wage growth, opioid abuse, many other social indicators, as you know. Sometimes it's better to get the bad reaction to that over with quickly while your civil society still is strong and you can react and respond and protest, and you know, four or eight years from now, make another decision, and maybe it's better to have that happen in 2017 than 20 years later when some of our problems are worse and our national mood is worse.

If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis.

The more information that's out there, the greater the returns to just being willing to sit down and apply yourself. Information isn't what's scarce; it's the willingness to do something with it.

We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor.