Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe... Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them. Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader. Maybe we think we are supposed to like tough books, but are we? Who says? Many writers (and art museums) produce for quite a small subsample of the... public.

The lesson about food is that the most predictable and the most orderly outcomes are always not the best. They are just easier to describe. Fads are orderly. Food carts and fires aren't. Feeding the world could be a delicious mess, full of diverse flavors and sometimes good old-fashioned smoke.

My view of the internet is that it is way overrated in what it’s done to date but considerably underrated in what it will do.

I'm not optimistic about reform in many, if any, policy areas at all. I think we'll make further progress by inventing new things that aren't much regulated yet and outracing bad policy. I look at so many policy areas - regulation, regulatory reform, health care reform - it's all failing, we're not making improvements, we're going backwards.

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

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.

Understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.