Cheaper Than Quotes

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job. Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.

We live in an age when it is cheaper to buy the rights to movies than to make them.

If you're angry, you don't have to write a poem dealing with the cause of your anger. But it needs to be an angry poem. So go ahead... write one. I know you're at least a little bit angry with me. And when you're done with your poem, decipher it as if you'd just found it printed in a textbook and know absolutely nothing about its author. The results can be amazing...and scary. But it's always cheaper than a therapist.

In a person's lifetime there may be not more than half a dozen occasions that he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment, there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart.

What's the woman doing there?" he asked. "Covering a scratch on the hood. She was cheaper than a new paint job." He flipped through a few more pages of barely dressed women and classic cars. "Nick used to have magazines like this when we were kids. But without the cars." He rotated a photo sideways. "Or the bathing suits.

It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted.

What's cheaper than a gallon of gas? An ebook. Save a dollar, stay home and read!

Employee loyalty is cheaper than hiring new employees, training them, and motivating them.

Power was sweeter than apples. It was cheaper than water, and sustained the soul twice as well. If Johann was going to be a Thing with a name, then from now on he would be a Thing with power, too.

Chocolate is cheaper than therapy, and you don't need an appointment.

running is cheaper than therapy.

Nature is cheaper than therapy.

I’ve fought in three campaigns,” he began. “In seven pitched battles. In countless raids and skirmishes and desperate defences, and bloody actions of every kind. I’ve fought in the driving snow, the blasting wind, the middle of the night. I’ve been fighting all my life, one enemy or another, one friend or another. I’ve known little else. I’ve seen men killed for a word, for a look, for nothing at all. A woman tried to stab me once for killing her husband, and I threw her down a well. And that’s far from the worst of it. Life used to be cheap as dirt to me. Cheaper. “I’ve fought ten single combats and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been ruthless, and brutal, and a coward. I’ve stabbed men in the back, burned them, drowned them, crushed them with rocks, killed them asleep, unarmed, or running away. I’ve run away myself more than once. I’ve pissed myself with fear. I’ve begged for my life. I’ve been wounded, often, and badly, and screamed and cried like a baby whose mother took her tit away. I’ve no doubt the world would be a better place if I’d been killed years ago, but I haven’t been, and I don’t know why.” He looked down at his hands, pink and clean on the stone. “There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there’s a lot of ’em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.

There was dancing to wear your feet down, and there were beautiful boys and girls, and kisses were cheaper than wine but the wine was sweet and the fruit sweeter. And you could still hear the music in your head.

If stupid hippies hadn't killed nuclear power, we'd have nuclear power plants, safer and cheaper than coal-fired plants, all over, and electric cars really would be zero emissions.

Today it is cheaper to start a business than tomorrow.

Buck found it to be cheaper to mend his ways than to retaliate.

Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure.

Generosity is always cheaper than greed.

It was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one.

The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand time smaller than the one computer at MIT in 1965.

You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven't you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you've seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?" She made a tiny spitting sound. "You can always get some more people. they reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It's the axiomatic truth of our times.

I don’t look in mirrors anymore. It’s cheaper than surgery.

What is cheaper than lust or of less value than alchemy or aphrodisiacs?

Nothing is cheaper than past glories.

American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.

Singing is probably the better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it’s cheaper, too.

Nice girl, dear boy." "Oh . . ." I shrugged. "You know." "Most attractive." "Cheaper than central heating." "I'm sure.

But not having cable or the Internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items.

Who ... what are they?" "My pride and glory," Alex said fondly. "Betty and Lucy Coltrane. Best damned bouncers in the business. Though of course I'd never tell them that. Fiercer than pit bulls and cheaper to run. Married to each other. They had a dog once, but they ate it.

We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.

It didn't take a Harvard economist to figure out that it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper spending money on helping keep kids safe when they were younger than it was to put them in jail when they were older. That was the American way, though. Spend a million dollars rescuing some kid who's fallen down a well, but God forbid you spend a hundred bucks up front to cap the well so the kid never falls down it in the first place.

I don’t think you lose anything by hallucinating. It’s cheaper than airfare, the destinations more interesting, and I’d rather have a mutant squid on my window than the State Department trying to do foreign affairs.

Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in its Marxian sense. Chicken! In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair or read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.

Societies only have waste products while acquiring fresh raw material remains a cheaper option than recycling.

Today, if you’re not disrupting yourself, someone else is; your fate is to be either the disrupter or the disrupted. There is no middle ground.

Titles were cheaper than dirt, and the riverlands were full of ruined castles, standing desolate amidst untended fields and burned villages.

Food manufacturers, from Big Food to the corner bakery, came to rely upon hydrogenated oils because they’re cheaper than butter and lard

Preventing assault is so much cheaper than trying to address it after the fact.

It's cheaper to pardon than to resent. Forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, and the waste of spirit.

Do you pay me? I feel more like a slave.” “Please, you’re way cheaper than a slave. You provide your own shelter, pay your own bills.” Ever

I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force—a force so great the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself…which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor—no artist—is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is “genius”), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.

better be cheaper, than being fake

in the future, the defining metric for organizations won’t be ROI (Return on Investment), but ROL (Return on Learning).

Nobody heard of Vietnam until there was a war,” Ali once proclaimed. “Nobody heard of Korea until there was a war. Nobody heard of Zaire until I fought there, and paying me is a whole lot cheaper than fighting a war.”9

So long as we have wage slavery," answered Schliemann, "it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old, dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down— it will be cheaper to build new; and so the steamships will be provided with stoking machinery , and so the dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found for their products. In exactly the same way, as the citizens of our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing— and how long do you think the custom would survive then?— To go on to another item— one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption; and one of the consequences of civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable diseases kill off half our population. And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion , poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish. For this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established their right to a human existence.

The ultimate objective is what the Gartner Group calls a zero latency enterprise—that is, a company in which the time between idea, acceptance and implementation all but disappears—and implementing

If you are talking about beauty, books are cheaper than cosmetics.

paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience—much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens.

The tipping point for e-voting fraud, I think, will be when they realize it's cheaper to hire hackers than to buy campaign ads.

I was honored at the awards ceremony. I didn’t get any recognition, but I was honored to be there. (Tickets were cheaper than I imagined!)


An industrial meat factory cannot produce a pound of bacon or a pork chop cheaper than a family farmer without breaking the law.

Do you know what's cheaper than therapy? Admitting you're batshit crazy and running with it.

Nothing in the study of history is cheaper than the exercise of unearned self-righteousness that derives from nothing more virtuous than ordinary hindsight.

Nothing is of more importance to the state than the quality of its spies. It is ten thousand times cheaper to pay the best spies lavishly than even a tiny army poorly.

There's one thing I've learned about mortals. They're a lot more resilient and a whole bunch more resourceful than they usually give themselves credit for. Why else do you think the Fae have always had such a fascination with them? Why d'you think Auberon uses changelings to guard the Gate? Trolls are stronger, cheaper, more plentiful, and nobody cares if they get exploded or ripped to pieces. But he uses mortals. Because they're full of hidden strengths.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Eyeglasses had been in use since the turn of the century, allowing old people to read more in their later years and greatly extending the scholar’s life of study. The manufacture of paper as a cheaper and more plentiful material than parchment was beginning to make possible multiple copies and wider distribution of literary works.

Markets mean patrons, buyers, consumers. There is under capitalism one way to wealth: to serve the consumers better and cheaper than other people do. But in the shop and factory, the owner—or in the corporations, the representative of the shareholders, the president—is the boss. The mastership is merely apparent and conditional. He is subject to the supremacy of the consumer. The consumer is king—the real boss—and the manufacturer is done for if he does not outstrip his competitors in best serving the consumers. It was this great economic transformation that changed the face of the world.

Imagine you have a hammer. That’s machine learning. It helped you climb a grueling mountain to reach the summit. That’s machine learning’s dominance of online data. On the mountaintop you find a vast pile of nails, cheaper than anything previously imaginable. That’s the new smart sensor tech. An unbroken vista of virgin board stretches before you as far as you can see. That’s the whole dumb world. Then you learn that any time you plant a nail in a board with your machine learning hammer, you can extract value from that formerly dumb plank. That’s data monetization. What do you do? You start hammering like crazy and you never stop, unless somebody makes you stop. But there is nobody up here to make us stop. This is why the “internet of everything” is inevitable.

Josh? Can you come to my room?” My wolfish grin broke some of the tension on her face. “Oh, stop. There’s a spider. I need you to kill it. Please. Before it disappears and I have to burn my whole house down.” I laughed. “Should I get my gun or…?” She bounced nervously. “Josh, I’m serious. I hate them. Please help me.” I pulled a few tissues from the box on my nightstand. “You know, you seem too fearless to be afraid of spiders.” “A black widow killed my schnauzer when I was a kid. Embracing a lifelong debilitating fear of spiders is cheaper than therapy.” She stopped in the doorway of her room like there was an invisible force field, and I almost bumped into her back.

Most people do not mind having a house that is smaller and/or a car that is cheaper than their neighbours’, as long as they each earn and have more money than their neighbours, and, equally important, their neighbours know that.

As Eric Ries explains, “The modern rule of competition is whoever learns fastest, wins.

when you move from point A to point B, you can then see point C. But you can’t see point C from point A. Iteration/experimentation is the only way.

They" hate us because they feel--and "they" are not wrong--that it is within our power to do so much more, and that we practice a kind of passive-aggressive violence on the Third World. We do this by, for example, demonizing tobacco as poison here while promoting cigarettes in Asia; inflating produce prices by paying farmers not to grow food as millions go hungry worldwide; skimping on quality and then imposing tariffs on foreign products made better or cheaper than our own; padding corporate profits through Third World sweatshops; letting drug companies stand by as millions die of AIDS in Africa to keep prices up on lifesaving drugs; and on and on. We do, upon reaching a very high comfort level, mostly choose to go from ten to eleven instead of helping another guy far away go from zero to one. We even do it in our own country. Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant book Nickel and Dimed describes the impossibility of living with dignity or comfort as one of the millions of minimum-wage workers in fast food, aisle-stocking and table-waiting jobs. Their labor for next to nothing ensures that well-off people can be a little more pampered. So if we do it to our own, what chance do foreigners have?

Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since--well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy Earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it “gross domestic product.

Singing when no one else is around is always good. I especially like belters. Good, loud singing is probably better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it's cheaper, too. I also think people should never turn down an opportunity to hold a baby. There's something about the feel of a new baby in your arms that just fixes you.

Creating a home that makes you feel wonderful is a gift you give yourself that echoes through the rest of your life. A bedroom you love is one in which you want to have an organized, well-cared-for wardrobe, which means less money spent replacing your battered items. A happy, practical, smartly appointed kitchen is one you actually *want* to cook in, which means much less money spent eating out or ordering in. A chic and comfortable living room means more entertaining at home and embracing the lost art of dinner parties (always cheaper than doing drinks and a restaurant dinner!). Even a Zen, candle-filled, clean bathroom is one in which you want to spend time doing home spa treatments instead of feeling like you have to go somewhere expensive to feel beautiful. If you create a home that is most attuned to your life and somewhere you really enjoy being, everything benefits.

trick, though. Treatment has always been more effective and cheaper than prison for true drug addicts. What’s changed, Norman said, is that no longer are most of the accused African American inner-city crack users and dealers. Most of the new Tennessee junkies come from the white middle and upper-middle classes, and from the state’s white rural heartland—people who vote for, donate to, live near, do business with, or are related to the majority of Tennessee legislators.

These we should refuse to buy, if we were compelled to give in payment for them our houses or some attractive and profitable estate; but we are eager to attain them at the cost of anxiety, of danger, and of lost honour, personal freedom, and time; so true it is that each man regards nothing as cheaper than himself.

In Detroit, it's so fucking poor that fire is cheaper than a movie. A can of gas is $3.50 and movie is 8 bucks. But there aren't any movie theaters left in Detroit so fuck it. They burn the empty house next door and they sit on the fucking porch with a 40, and they're barbecuing and laughing because it's fucking entertainment.

Martin Seligman, a leading expert on positive psychology, differentiates between three states of happiness: the pleasurable life (hedonistic, superficial), the good life (family and friends) and the meaningful life (finding purpose, transcending ego, working toward a higher good). Research shows that Millennials—those born between 1984 and 2002—are showing an orientation towards seeking meaning and purpose in their lives.

The cost savings weren’t what did the trick, though. Treatment has always been more effective and cheaper than prison for true drug addicts. What’s changed, Norman said, is that no longer are most of the accused African American inner-city crack users and dealers. Most of the new Tennessee junkies come from the white middle and upper-middle classes, and from the state’s white rural heartland—people who vote for, donate to, live near, do business with, or are related to the majority of Tennessee legislators.

There are phases in history when defensive techniques progress more quickly than offensive techniques. During these periods, wars become rarer because the cost of attacking is higher than the cost of defending. But there are other times when offensive technologies gain the upper hand. These are the bloodiest ages, when wars break out more frequently, because attacking others is cheaper than defending what you have. ... These days, attack is cheaper than defence. Much cheaper. And the price keeps coming down.

In an ExO world, purpose trumps strategy and execution overrides planning.

It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.

as data becomes the new oil, many business models will be transformed from hardware to software to services.

Adalja observes that Bioshield cost in the low billions of dollars, far less than Covid-19 will cost. Preparation is always cheaper than reparation.

if one’s the employer of an executive who’s worthy in some ways but deeply flawed in others, it’s sometimes cheaper to fix the executive than to replace him. Or her.

Forgiveness is cheaper than permission.

Writing is my own personal therapy. It's cheaper than a real shrink and I get to kill people off when I grow bored of them.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work. – Stephen King

A brick could be used as a headstone. Or the instrument that proves “until death do us part” is faster and cheaper than a divorce.


Ice cream is three times more soothing and infinitely cheaper than counseling.

..you should write. It's better than succumbing to the madness of the world... And cheaper than pills

Why would condoms be cheaper than pads

It is far cheaper to build schoolhouses than prisons, and it is much better to have scholars than convicts.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work. —STEPHEN KING

An iron railroad would be a cheaper thing than a road of the common construction." Here lay in a few words the idea from which our railway system has sprung.

even after self-driving vehicles prove themselves safer and cheaper than human drivers, politicians and consumers might nevertheless block the change for years, perhaps decades.

Victims receive heat when given any sum. Few acknowledge that healing is costly. That we should be allocating more funds for victims, for therapy, extra security, potential moving costs, getting back on their feet, buying something as simple as court clothes. As Michele pointed out, Preventing assault is so much cheaper than trying to address it after the fact.

When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That’s why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as “creative destruction.” But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn’t that the problem isn’t potentially large. It’s just that human ingenuity—when given proper incentives—is bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined. Indeed, in the final chapter of this book we’ll meet a band of renegade engineers who have developed not one but three global-warming fixes, any of which could be bought for less than the annual sales tally of all the Thoroughbred horses at Keeneland auction house in Kentucky.

but the problem now was that sometimes the heroin wasn’t heroin anymore, sometimes now it was fentanyl, seeping into the market by mail and by ship, fifty times more potent than heroin and cheaper to produce.

Work is the most useless of vices. There is no commodity in the world cheaper than labor. While wages fall and hours rise, the labor market vomits up people. Take it or leave it – there’s a long line behind you.

The fact that work is cheaper in Dubai than in Japan is not just a fluke. Work is more productive in richer countries. That is one of the reasons these countries are generally more prosperous. Selling used equipment from rich countries to poor countries can be an efficient way to handle the situation for both types of countries.

McKinsey & Company advised AT&T not to enter the mobile telephone business, predicting there would be fewer than one million cellular phones in use by 2000. In fact, by 2000, there were one hundred million mobile phones.

How on earth can we ever expect our society to get thinner when no-one is making any effort to make the healthy food cheaper than the toxic, fatty stuff that’s creating a nation of tubby fuckers with too many fillings? The

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work. STEPHEN KING Best-selling author with over 40 books in print, many of which have been made into movies

Myriad Genetics, which holds the patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes responsible for most cases of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, charges $3,000 to test for the genes. Myriad has been accused of creating a monopoly, since no one else can offer the test, and researchers can’t develop cheaper tests or new therapies without getting permission from Myriad and paying steep licensing fees. Scientists who’ve gone ahead with research involving the breast-cancer genes without Myriad’s permission have found themselves on the receiving end of cease-and-desist letters and threats of litigation. In May 2009 the American Civil Liberties Union, several breast-cancer survivors, and professional groups representing more than 150,000 scientists sued Myriad Genetics over its breast-cancer gene patents. Among other things, scientists involved in the case claim that the practice of gene patenting has inhibited their research, and they aim to stop it. The presence of so many scientists in the suit, many of them from top institutions, challenges the standard argument that ruling against biological patents would interfere with scientific progress

Lodging is not only much cheaper in London than in Paris; it is much cheaper than in Edinburgh, of the same degree of goodness; and, what may seem extraordinary, the dearness of house-rent is the cause of the cheapness of lodging.

Stanford was offering $150,000 total, which would cover therapy for my sister and me for a handful of years. Victims receive heat when given any sum. Few acknowledge that healing is costly. That we should be allocating more funds for victims, for therapy, extra security, potential moving costs, getting back on their feel, buying something as simple as court clothes. As Michele pointed out, Preventing assault is so much cheaper than trying to address it after the fact.

There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.

A country with secure property rights, scientific inquiry and technological innovation will become richer. But, since division of labour is limited by the size of the market, it will also benefit from trade, not just in goods and services, but in ideas, capital and people. The smaller a country is, the greater the benefits. Trade is far cheaper than empire, just as internal development is a less costly route to prosperity than plunder. This was the heart of Angell's argument.

I was young and stupid,” I said simply. “I was used. I killed for people like you because I knew no better. Then I learned better. What happened at Innenin taught me better. Now I don’t kill for anyone but myself, and every time that I take a life, I know the value of it.” “The value of it. The value of a human life.” Kawahara shook her head like a teacher with an exasperating student. “You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven’t you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you’ve seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?” She made a tiny spitting sound. “You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format? Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It’s the axiomatic truth of our times.

Traditional marketing is not focused on creating new categories. Traditional marketing is focused on creating new customers. Traditional marketing involves finding out what consumers want and then giving them what they want, better and cheaper than the competition.

Uber operates as UberTaxi in Athens. (You book your ride through the app, but a taxi picks you up.) Uber is generally cheaper than hailing a cab (often even half the cost, except for rides to and from the airport where there’s no savings). Note there is a €3 minimum charge.

No philosophy is cheaper or more vulgar than that which traces all history to diversities of ethnological type and blend, and is ever presenting the venal Greek, the perfidious Sicilian, the proud and indolent Spaniard, the economical Swiss, the vain and vivacious Frenchman.

In this manner, in early days, were formed those vast and prodigious layers of coal, which an ever—increasing consumption must utterly use up in about three centuries more, if people do not find some more economic light than gas, and some cheaper motive power than steam. All

Nothing has changed about the choice except what you’ve spent to get the tickets: time in the first case, money in the second. What this and other experiments confirm is what you might expect: we are more sensitive to small losses of money than small losses of time. We feel we’ve lost more if we choose cheaper tickets than we do if we choose tickets based on working fewer hours. You probably felt this when you were making the ticket choice. Two hundred dollars is a lot to give up. On the other hand, fifteen hours of time isn’t that much more than five hours.

I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood trauma- that becoming a writer is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force- a force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking.

Power holders as well as seekers of power work to legitimate their chosen frames through rituals and symbols. We saw earlier that this is in part a matter of efficiency: It is cheaper to organize a parade that whips up enthusiasm for the regime than it is to operate a police state.

Now, I assume you don’t want me to cart you back to Fjerda or the Shu Han?” It was clear Nina had finished the translation when Kuwei yelped, “No!” “Then your choices are Novyi Zem and the Southern Colonies, but the Kerch presence in the colonies is far lower. Also, the weather is better, if you’re partial to that kind of thing. You are a stolen painting, Kuwei. Too recognizable to sell on the open market, too valuable to leave lying around. You are worthless to me.” “I’m not translating that,” Nina snapped. “Then translate this: My sole concern is keeping you away from Jan Van Eck, and if you want me to start exploring more definite options, a bullet is a lot cheaper than putting you on a ship to the Southern Colonies.” Nina did translate, though haltingly. Kuwei responded in Shu. She hesitated. “He says you’re cruel.” “I’m pragmatic. If I were cruel, I’d give him a eulogy instead of a conversation. So, Kuwei, you’ll go to the Southern Colonies, and when the heat has died down, you can find your way to Ravka or Matthias’ grandmother’s house for all I care.” “Leave my grandmother out of this,” Matthias said.

Per ounce, organic grass-finished beef is cheaper than many common foods like potato chips, red wine, name-brand cookies, popular coffee drinks, fancy donuts, and even fresh strawberries. And if we were to compare price per gram of protein, or per micronutrient, we’d see an even better value.

Today, books are cheaper than ever. Courses are free. Access to teachers is no longer a barrier—technology has done away with that. There is no excuse for not getting your education, and because the information we have before us is so vast, there is no excuse for ever ending that process either.

Seems to me you’ve got two choices: one, you can get in a gunfight with the United States government—because that always ends well—or you can run downstairs, get as many of your boys out through the emergency exits as you can, and order the rest to surrender. Your call, but bail money’s a lot cheaper than a tombstone.

A young man in a white coat was pouring some rich fragrant liquid into her cup. She accepted it with gratitude and resignation, for it was strong and bitter, almost medicinal, and as she drank she was conscious that it was doing her good. Tea is more healthy than alcohol and much cheaper, she reflected, and there must be thousands of people who know this.

We hold nothing dearer than a benefit, so long as we are seeking one; we hold nothing cheaper after we have received it.

According to noted hotelier Chip Conley, “Culture is what happens when the boss leaves.

When failure is not an option, you end up with safe, incremental innovation, with no radical breakthroughs or disruptive innovations.

You have to be self-aware and look for that startup idea and purpose that is a perfect fit with you—with you as a person, not as a business[person].

Bloggers around the world are discovering that it’s cheaper and faster and more effective to build their own media channels than it is to waste time arguing with the old ones.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk.

I go to a beauty salon and have my hair blown dry. It’s cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting

Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st.

as technology brings us a world of abundance, access will triumph over ownership.

Today, if you’re not disrupting yourself, someone else is;

It is our opinion that in the future, the defining metric for organizations won’t be ROI (Return on Investment), but ROL (Return on Learning).

In 2013, Reddit, which has just fifty-one employees, most of whom manage the platform, saw 731 million unique visitors cast 6.7 billion votes on 41 million stories.

The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects,

With the growing budget crisis in public education, it’s cheaper for schools to not have to construct and maintain buildings for students. Machines are less expensive than real teachers.

(For much the same reason, early owners discovered that if they charged odd amounts like 49 cents or 99 cents the cashier would very probably have to open the drawer to extract a penny change, obviating the possibility of the dreaded unrecorded transaction. Only later did it dawn on merchants that $1.99 had the odd subliminal quality of seeming markedly cheaper than $2.)

The difference between the good and the great is the difference between your mindset and your skill set. In a world where skills are bountiful, and increasingly outsourced to cheaper parts of the world, we need more than skills to survive, let alone thrive. Mindset separates the best from the rest: the right mindset drives the right habits, which drive the right performance.

Undesirable work is fully automated, as employers feel increasing pressure to automate because labor is no longer too cheap. The reasoning here is that, as I argued in the last chapter, one of the things holding back full automation of the economy isn’t that the technical solutions are lacking, it’s that wages are so low that it’s cheaper to hire humans than to buy machines.

One reason (though not the main one) is that American health care “providers”—doctors, nurses, hospitals, drug companies—make more money for what they do than their counterparts overseas do.

In fact, the best definition we’ve found for a startup comes from Ries: “A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Reasoning systematically, Marx was one of the few socialists to understand that economic competition, motivated by "greed," was what drove prices down under capitalism, as capitalists ceaselessly searched for more profits by seeking cheaper ways of producing than those possessed by their fellow capitalist rivals. Mutual competition ensured that capitalists were in no position simply to tack higher profits onto production costs. Therefore, as production costs were driven down throughout an industry, prices tended to be driven down as well, to the benefit of the consuming public.

To demonstrate, consider the number of times the founders of the following companies pitched investors before finally succeeding: Company Number of Investor Pitches Skype 40 Cisco 76 Pandora 300 Google 350

First, altruism and morality generally are consumption goods like any other, so we should expect people to buy more altruism when the price is low.34 Second, due to the low probability of decisiveness, the price of altruism is drastically cheaper in politics than in markets.35 Voting to raise your taxes by a thousand dollars when your probability of decisiveness is 1 in 100,000 has an expected cost of a penny.

Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. There

Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to ‘wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian ocean’, in the words of the ultra-nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world’s major trading routes. Some of the ports on the Arctic, such as Murmansk, freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is ice-locked for about four months and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power. In addition, water-borne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes.

Vodafone took India to court for trying to make them pay tax. Vodafone won. US agribusiness giant Cargill/ADM sued Mexico for introducing a sugar tax on soft drinks to fight childhood obesity. Cargill/ADM won. Mexico was sued for daring to put a cap on the price of water, access to which is a basic human right under the UN charter. The manufacturer won and as a result, Coca Cola is now cheaper to drink than bottled water in Mexico.9

Jerry Michalski notes that in the past, scarcity meant value. That is, without scarcity, you didn’t have a business. Now that notion has been upended. Dave Blakely of IDEO thinks about ExOs in the following way: “These new organizations are exponential because they took something scarce and made it abundant.” Nokia bought Navteq, trying to buy, own and control scarcity, only to be leapfrogged by Waze, which managed to harness abundance.

The summer dresses are unpacked and hanging in the closet, two of them, pure cotton, which is better than synthetics like the cheaper ones, though even so, when it's muggy, in July and August, you sweat inside them. No worry about sunburn though, said Aunt Lydia. The spectacles women used to make of themselves. Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and shoulders, on the street, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder those things used to happen. [...] And not good for the complexion, not at all, wrinkle you up like a dried apple. But we weren't supposed to care about our complexions any more, she'd forgotten that.

An Exponential Organization (ExO) is one whose impact (or output) is disproportionally large—at least 10x larger—compared to its peers because of the use of new organizational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies.

I’m an old man trying to give a young daughter advice, and it’s like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear. A drunk driver took my son’s life seventeen years ago and my wife has never been the same since. I’ve always seen the question of abortion in terms of Fred. I seem to be helpless to see it any other way, just as helpless as you were to stop your giggles when they came on you at that poetry reading, Frannie. Your mother would argue against it for all the standard reasons. Morality, she’d say. A morality that goes back two thousand years. The right to life. All our Western morality is based on that idea. I’ve read the philosophers. I range up and down them like a housewife with a dividend check in the Sears and Roebuck store. Your mother sticks with the Reader’s Digest, but it’s me that ends up arguing from feeling and her from the codes of morality. I just see Fred. He was destroyed inside. There was no chance for him. These right-to-life biddies hold up their pictures of babies drowned in salt, and arms and legs scraped out onto a steel table, so what? The end of a life is never pretty. I just see Fred, lying in that bed for seven days, everything that was ruined pasted over with bandages. Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper. I read more than she does, but she is the one who ends up making more sense on this one. What we do and what we think… those things are so often based on arbitrary judgments when they are right. I can’t get over that. It’s like a block in my throat, how all true logic seems to proceed from irrationality. From faith. I’m not making much sense, am I?

The entrepreneur who is reckoning in terms of a currency with a stable value is unable to compete with the entrepreneur who is prepared to make a quasi-gift of part of his capital to his customers. In 1920 and 1921, Dutch traders who had sold commodities to Austria could buy them back again after a while much cheaper than they had originally sold them, because the Austrian traders completely failed to see that they were selling them for less than they had cost.

On Westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century.

One of the many signs of verbal virtuosity among intellectuals is the repackaging of words to mean things that are not only different from, but sometimes the direct opposite of, their original meanings. 'Freedom' and 'power' are among the most common of these repackaged words. The basic concept of freedom as not being subjected to other people's restrictions, and of power as the ability to restrict other people's options have both been stood on their heads in some of the repackaging of these words by intellectuals discussing economic issues. Thus business enterprises who expand the public's options, either quantitatively (through lower prices) or qualitatively (through better products) are often spoken of as 'controlling' the market, whenever this results in a high percentage of consumers choosing to purchase their particular products rather than the competing products of other enterprises. In other words, when consumers decide that particular brands of products are either cheaper or better than competing brands of those products, third parties take it upon themselves to depict those who produced these particular brands as having exercised 'power' or 'control.' If, at a given time, three-quarters of the consumers prefer to buy the Acme brand of widgets to any other brand, then Acme Inc. will be said to 'control' three-quarters of the market, even though consumers control 100 percent of the market, since they can switch to another brand of widgets tomorrow if someone else comes up with a better widget, or stop buying widgets altogether if a new product comes along that makes widgets obsolete. ....by saying that businesses have 'power' because they have 'control' of their markets, this verbal virtuosity opens the way to saying that government needs to exercise its 'countervailing power' (John Kenneth Galbraith's phrase) in order to protect the public. Despite the verbal parallels, government power is in fact power, since individuals do not have a free choice as to whether or not to obey government laws and regulations, while consumers are free to ignore the products marketed by even the biggest and supposedly most 'powerful' corporations in the world.

the Times says there's a heroin epidemic, Malone thinks, which is only an epidemic of course because now white people are dying. Whites started to get opium-based pills from their physicians: oxycodone, vicodin... But, it was expensive and doctors were reluctant to prescribe too much for exactly the fear of addiction. So the white folks went to the open market and the pills became a street drug. It was all very nice and civilized until the Sinoloa cartel down in Mexico made a corporate decision that it could undersell the big American pharmaceutical companies by raising production of its heroin thereby reducing price. As an incentive, they also increased its potency. The addicted white Americans found that Mexican ... heroin was cheaper and stronger than the pills, and started shooting it into their veins and overdosing. Malone literally saw it happening. He and his team busted more bridge-and-tunnel junkies, suburban housewives and upper Eastside madonnas than they could count....

It was a rule with him that people could be better served and cheaper served by other people’s servants than by their own. Even in the stables at Bicester the innkeeper had to find what assistance was wanted, and charge for it in the bill. And George Vavasor was no Sybarite. He did not deem it impracticable to put on his own trousers without having a man standing at his foot to hold up the leg of the garment. A valet about a man knows a great deal of a man’s ways, and therefore George had no valet.

commodification of information is the only thing that’s made space travel economically feasible. It’s the only commodity whose value exceeds its transportation cost. We’d be exporting biologicals or photonics if it paid. But our trading partners can build the machines and grow the organics much cheaper than we can send them, if they just have the codes and specs. If information were free, the way the radicals want, then there would be nothing to trade, and there goes the only incentive for interstellar ties.

I can give you a very good tip if you want to keep burglars out of your house. A light on for the burglar to see is the very best single means of protection. One of the ideal things is to leave a bathroom light on all night. The bathroom is one place where somebody could be, for any length of time, at any time of the night, and he would be likely to hear the slightest strange sound. The burglar, knowing this, won't try to enter. 'It's also the cheapest possible protection. The kilowatts are a lot cheaper than your valuables.

After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.

I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood trauma- that becoming a writer is a direst result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force- a force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking.

This raises the interesting, if seemingly outlandish, question of why car drivers, virtually alone among users of wheeled transport, do not wear helmets. Yes, cars do provide a nice metal cocoon with inflatable cushions. But in Australia, for example, head injuries among car occupants, according to research by the Federal Office of Road Safety, make up half the country’s traffic-injury costs. Helmets, cheaper and more reliable than side-impact air bags, would reduce injuries and cut fatalities by some 25 percent.95 A crazy idea, perhaps, but so were air bags once.

Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money—a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One’s

There's one big difference between the poor and the rich,' Kite says, taking a drag from his cigarette. We are in a pub, at lunch-time. John Kite is always, unless stated otherwise, smoking a fag, in a pub, at lunch-time. 'The rich aren't evil, as so many of my brothers would tell you. I've known rich people -- I have played on their yachts -- and they are not unkind, or malign, and they do not hate the poor, as many would tell you. And they are not stupid -- or at least, not any more than the poor are. Much as I find amusing the idea of a ruling class of honking toffs, unable to put their socks on without Nanny helping them, it is not true. They build banks, and broker deals, and formulate policy, all with perfect competency. 'No -- the big difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich are blithe. They believe nothing can ever really be so bad, They are born with the lovely, velvety coating of blitheness -- like lanugo, on a baby -- and it is never rubbed off by a bill that can't be paid; a child that can't be educated; a home that must be left for a hostel, when the rent becomes too much. 'Their lives are the same for generations. There is no social upheaval that will really affect them. If you're comfortably middle-class, what's the worst a government policy could do? Ever? Tax you at 90 per cent and leave your bins, unemptied, on the pavement. But you and everyone you know will continue to drink wine -- but maybe cheaper -- go on holiday -- but somewhere nearer -- and pay off your mortgage -- although maybe later. 'Consider, now, then, the poor. What's the worst a government policy can do to them? It can cancel their operation, with no recourse to private care. It can run down their school -- with no escape route to a prep. It can have you out of your house and into a B&B by the end of the year. When the middle-classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats -- their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. 'Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us -- no walking around National Trust properties, or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful; dying in mines, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate, then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor -- that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better, later. We live now -- for our instant, hot, fast treats, to prep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. 'You must never, never forget, when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad postcode, It's a miracle when someone from a bad postcode gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.

I indicated that I had some free time at the moment and was willing to investigate what sounded like a most important case. “How much do you charge?” he asked. “$500 a day, plus expenses.” “Will the expenses make it less?” “Possibly, but in my experience expenses usually add to the total.” He thought about this for a moment, then frowned. “Well, I suppose I should just forget about it then. Spending $500 a day to find something worth $20 wouldn't make economic sense.” “That’s true, if it's just the money you're concerned with here and not the justice angle.” “No, it was the money more than anything else. I guess it would be cheaper to just buy another one.

History, practical experience, common sense and economic theory all agree: economic competition is probably one of the greatest ideas humans ever came up with. When people compete to achieve the same goal, great things seem to happen that otherwise would not. Things get done faster, cheaper, and better; new methods for lifting a weight or quenching a thirst are invented; the average guy ends up with more of the stuff he likes at a lower price than before. That is why, in the end, socialism collapsed like a rotten wall: it did not allow its people to compete and, as a result, it not only made their economic life miserable, but strangled their hearts and souls.

No regrets?” he murmured to Hunt as they strode down the hall, while Shaw and St. Vincent followed at a more leisurely pace. Hunt glanced at him with a questioning smile. He was a big, dark-haired man, with the same sense of uncompromising masculinity and the same avid interest in hunting and sportsmanship that Marcus possessed. “About what?” “Being led around by the nose by your wife.” That drew a wry grin from Hunt, and he shook his head. “If my wife does lead me around, Westcliff, it’s by an altogether different body part. And no, I have no regrets whatsoever.” “I suppose there’s a certain convenience in being married,” Marcus mused aloud. “Having a woman close at hand to satisfy your needs, not to mention the fact that a wife is undoubtedly more economical than a mistress. There is, moreover, the begetting of heirs to consider…” Hunt laughed at his effort to cast the issue in a practical light. “I didn’t marry Annabelle for convenience. And although I haven’t tabulated any numbers, I can assure you that she is not cheaper than a mistress. As for the begetting of heirs, that was the farthest thing from my mind when I proposed to her.” “Then why did you?” “I would tell you, but not long ago you said that you hoped I wouldn’t start—how did you put it?—‘pollinate the air with maudlin sentiment.’” “You believe yourself to be in love with her.” “No,” Hunt countered in a relaxed manner, “I am in love with her.” Marcus lifted his shoulders in a brief shrug. “If believing that makes marriage more palatable to you, so be it.” “Good God, Westcliff…” Hunt murmured, a curious smile on his face, “haven’t you ever been in love?” “Of course. Obviously I have found that some women are preferable to others in terms of disposition and physical appearance—” “No, no, no…I’m not referring to finding someone who is ‘preferable.’ I mean completely being absorbed by a woman who fills you with desperation, longing, ecstasy…” Marcus threw him a disparaging glance. “I haven’t time for that nonsense.” Hunt annoyed him by laughing.

<...> slaves became the major form of Southern wealth (aside from land), and slaveholding became the means to prosperity. <...> The later impoverishment of the South nourished the myth that the slave economy had always been historically “backward,” stagnating, and unproductive. We now know that investment in slaves brought a considerable profit and that the Southern economy grew rapidly throughout the pre–Civil War decades. It is true, however, that the system depended largely on the international demand for cotton as the world entered the age of industrialization, led by the British textile industry. There was an increasing demand for clothing that was cheaper than linen and not as hot and heavy as wool.

At forty-two, I was still holding up pretty well, but my once effortlessly lean body now look as though it belonged in a Dove firming cream ad -- the one where they give women permission to have thighs. When I unbuttoned my jeans at night, I swore I heard the same sound that Pillsbury dough made when I twisted the cylindrical container. My hair was beginning to gray, and when I smiled, the parentheses around my mouth remained. My least favorite position in yoga class was the downward dog because, as I hung my head downward, I always felt the skin from my face was about to splatter against my mat like a pancake batter hitting the griddle. So being called the top model by a young Italian was a wonderful souvenir, though cheaper than the toys sold outside the Pantheon in Rome.

How good one feels when one is full—how satisfied with ourselves and with the world!  People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained.  One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal—so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted. It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs.  We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so.  It dictates to us our emotions, our passions.  After eggs and bacon, it says, “Work!”  After beefsteak and porter, it says, “Sleep!”  After a cup of tea (two spoonsful for each cup, and don’t let it stand more than three minutes), it says to the brain, “Now, rise, and show your strength.  Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature and into life; spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!” After hot muffins, it says, “Be dull and soulless, like a beast of the field—a brainless animal, with listless eye, unlit by any ray of fancy, or of hope, or fear, or love, or life.”  And after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, it says, “Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men may laugh—drivel in folly, and splutter in senseless sounds, and show what a helpless ninny is poor man whose wit and will are drowned, like kittens, side by side, in half an inch of alcohol.” We

I suddenly realised she was playing Chopin's Scherzo in B Flat Minor and I closed my eyes to hide the tears; when the interval came Pipi kissed me on both cheeks – he was always so grateful when anyone praised his mistresses. We went down to talk to her, she simpered prettily, looked very pleased with herself and flirted with him, and when he told her that she had made me cry she blushed with pleasure, I smiled and shook hands with her, and he grinned with delight; I looked at him as if he were an idiot: he had never seen my mother at the piano, with her mane of black hair flowing down over her shoulders, playing by the light of two tiny candles – they were cheaper than electricity – while the room smelled of cooking fat. The supper often burned as I stood entranced because she was playing Chopin.

It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia. The Indians were plundered by white frontiersmen, who were taxed and controlled by the Jamestown elite. And the whole colony was being exploited by England, which bought the colonists’ tobacco at prices it dictated and made 100,000 pounds a year for the King. Berkeley himself, returning to England years earlier to protest the English Navigation Acts, which gave English merchants a monopoly of the colonial trade, had said: . . . we cannot but resent, that forty thousand people should be impoverish’d to enrich little more than forty Merchants, who being the only buyers of our Tobacco, give us what they please for it, and after it is here, sell it how they please; and indeed have forty thousand servants in us at cheaper rates, than any other men have slaves. . . .

There was now a commercial reason for removing the Apocrypha—Bibles without it were both cheaper to produce, and smaller (and hence cheaper to transport overseas). Sensitive to the importance of both production and transportation costs, the missionary societies gradually came to the view that the Apocrypha would be omitted—primarily for financial, rather than theological reasons. As far as is known, the first missionary society to take this decision was the British and Foreign Bible Society. Its decision of 1826 to cease including the Apocrypha in their Bibles is known to have given a major stimulus to the growing trend to publish Bibles without the Apocrypha. In very general terms, Bibles produced for a predominantly Protestant readership now tend to exclude the Apocrypha, and those intended for a Roman Catholic readership include it.

Kids aren’t learning science right these days! The teachers teach it like it’s just supposed to be useful, like, here, learn this geometry so you can design a building, here, learn this chemistry so you can make a plastic bag. Of course kids don’t like it! No kid comes home from school and says, ‘I want to make plastic bags when I grow up!’ We already have plastic bags, and comfy chairs, and flying cars, we’ve had them for centuries, and they aren’t getting better because they work already so no one’s interested in replacing them, just making them cheaper, or with more games. That isn’t science! Science is figuring out where the universe is going! Science is noticing that the ants crawling up the picnic table like your sandwich better than your ba’sib’s and asking, ‘Why?’ Not ‘How is this useful?’ not ‘Can I make this into a plastic bag?’ but ‘Why?

That women want early abortion, that many women prefer medication to surgery, that especially in rural areas it would be a lot simpler and cheaper and less stressful for women to get a prescription from their local OBGYN or GP than to travel long distances to a clinic, that it would be a good thing to free women from having to run a gauntlet of protesters—none of that mattered. What women want in their abortion care is simply not important.

Mother—crazy as she was—had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop. Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town. You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

many ExOs are adopting the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Invented at Intel by CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google by venture capitalist John Doerr in 1999, OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way. In High Output Management, Grove’s highly regarded manual, he introduced OKRs as the answer to two simple questions: Where do I want to go? (Objectives) How will I know I’m getting there? (Key Results to ensure progress is made)

Short-termism also dominates in the marketplace. The market uses a discount rate of 10% per year (or more) when comparing costs now with benefits in the future. This means that a benefit that lies twenty years ahead will be valued at one-tenth of its real value. In other words, a problem twenty years in the future will be worth solving only if the cost of the solution is less than one-tenth of the value saved. It comes as no surprise to those who know economics that it is “cost efficient” to allow the world to collapse from climate damage, as long as the collapse is more than forty years into the future. The net present value of reducing emissions and saving the world is lower than the net present value of business as usual. It is cheaper to push the world over the cliff than to try to save it. The political world is not much better, given the short tenure of political appointments. Politicians can rarely spend time on agendas that yield a positive result only after the next election—which is normally less than four years away.

The CRISPR-based tests developed by Mammoth and Sherlock are cheaper and faster than conventional PCR tests. They also have an advantage over antigen tests, such as the one developed by Abbott Labs that was approved in August of the plague year. The CRISPR-based tests can detect the presence of the RNA of a virus as soon as a person has been infected. But the antigen tests, which detect the presence of proteins that exist on the surface of the virus, are most accurate only after a patient has become highly infectious to others.

Lieutenant Thomas R. Gilligan, thirty-seven, was off duty and out of uniform, checking out TVs in an electronics store. He went to investigate the commotion and stopped James Powell, a ninth grader who had joined the mob of angry students. Powell was unarmed, according to witnesses. Gilligan maintained that the boy flashed a knife. He shot him three times. Two days later, Harlem erupted. Pierce told Carney, "You have the people who are angry. Justifably so. And then there's the police force. How are they going to defend this shit? Again! And city hall and the activists. And in the way back of the room, you can barely hear a little voice, and that's the family. They've lost a son. Somebody has to speak for them." "They're going to sue?" "Sue and win. You know they ain't going to fire the bastard." Sermon crept into his voice here. "What kind of message will that send--that their police force is accountable? We'll sue, and it will take years, and the city will pay because millions and millions are still cheaper than putting a true price on killing a black boy.

Likewise, our housing should be functional: It should do little more than keep out extreme heat and cold, and shelter us from the sun and wind. A cave would be fine, if one were available. He reminds us that houses with courtyards, fancy color schemes, and gilded ceilings are hard to maintain. Furthermore, our simple house should be furnished simply. Its kitchen should be supplied with earthenware and iron vessels rather than those made of silver and gold; besides being cheaper, Musonius observes, such vessels are easier to cook with and less likely to be stolen.11

Because I don't make the mistake that high-culture mongers do of assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too,” the late filmmaker Dennis Potter once said, explaining why pop songs were so important in his work, from Pennies from Heaven to The Singing Detective to Lipstick on Your Collar, his paean to the 1950s, the time he shared with the Independent Group—and Potter was also defining a pop ethos, defining what I think is happening in Paolizzi's collage. "When people say, 'Oh listen, they're playing our song,' they don't mean 'Our song, this little cheap, tinkling, syncopated piece of rubbish, is what we felt when we met.' What they're saying is, 'That song reminds us of that tremendous feeling we had when we met.' Some of the songs I use are great anyway, but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of descent from David's Psalms. They're saying, 'Listen, the world isn't quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,' 'There's you and me in it,' or 'The sun is shining in it.' So-called dumb people, simple people, uneducated people, have as authentic and profound depth of feeling as the most educated on earth. Anyone who says different is a fascist.

In 1967 Kilby and his team produced almost what Haggerty envisioned. It could do only four tasks (add, subtract, multiply, and divide) and was a bit heavy (more than two pounds) and not very cheap ($150).21 But it was a huge success. A new market had been created for a device people had not known they needed. And following the inevitable trajectory, it kept getting smaller, more powerful, and cheaper. By 1972 the price of a pocket calculator had dropped to $100, and 5 million units were sold. By 1975 the price was down to $25, and sales were doubling every year. In 2014 a Texas Instruments pocket calculator cost $3.62 at Walmart.

Since well-educated people are better voters, another tempting way to improve democracy is to give voters more education. Maybe it would work. But it would be expensive, and as mentioned in the previous chapter, education may be a proxy for intelligence or curiosity. A cheaper strategy, and one where a causal effect is more credible, is changing the curriculum. Steven Pinker argues that schools should try to “provide students with the cognitive skills that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with,” by emphasizing “economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics.”60 Pinker essentially wants to give schools a new mission: rooting out the biased beliefs that students arrive with, especially beliefs that impinge on government policy.61 What should be cut to make room for the new material? There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than elementary economics.62

Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild had different, better ideas. Both men, nearly simultaneously, came up with the idea of constructing all of the components in a circuit out of silicon, so that a complete circuit could exist within one piece—one chip—of semiconductor material. By eliminating the tyranny of interconnections, the method seemed to suggest substantial advantages in manufacturing and operational speed. Their innovation could, in short, be better and cheaper. Kilby had the idea in the summer of 1958, probably a few months earlier than Noyce. But Noyce’s design was arguably more elegant and more useful.

For the first three years, it’s fun being a pro football player’s girlfriend.   “Marlee, let me see your hand! Did Chris propose yet?” Amber asks.   I’m in year ten.   “Still naked.” I wiggle my fingers in front of her the same way I did last week and the week before that . . . and the week before that. #HeDidntPutARingOnIt   Sometimes, I like to hashtag my life. #CheaperThanTherapy   I sip my margarita. “When it happens, I promise to let you know.” Or, you know, keep asking every time you see me.   “Marlee.” Courtney sighs. She stands at the head of the table clutching a glitter-coated gavel. “We made exceptions for you to join the Lady Mustangs. Try to acknowledge that and save your little side conversation until we’ve finished.”   “Sorry, Court.” Every time I call her Court, she strains her Botoxed forehead and glares in my direction, so obviously, it’s the only thing I call her. Well, sometimes I call her bitch, but she doesn’t know about that.   “As I was saying, the annual Lady Mustangs Fashion Show is in three weeks. Everyone must attend the next meeting so we can discuss the outfits for you and your husbands.”   I catch her eye again. She raises her chin, and her fat-injected lips form an actual smile.   “Oh, I’m sorry. In your case, Marlee, you and your boyfriend.”   See? What a bitch.   “Thanks for the clarification, Court, but I understood.

If...capital is divided between two different grocers, their competition will tend to make both of them sell cheaper, than if it were in the hands of one only; and if it were divided among twenty, their competition would be just so much the greater, and the chance of their combining together, in order to raise the price, just so much the less. Their competition might perhaps ruin some of themselves; but to take care of this is the business of the parties concerned, and it may safely be trusted to their discretion. It can never hurt either the consumer, or the producer; on the contrary, it must tend to make the retailers both sell cheaper and buy dearer, than if the whole trade was monopolized by one or two persons.

It is one of the great beauties of our system, that a working-man may raise himself into the power and position of a master by his own exertions and behaviour; that, in fact, every one who rules himself to decency and sobriety of conduct, and attention to his duties, comes over to our ranks; it may not be always as a master, but as an over-looker, a cashier, a book-keeper, a clerk, one on the side of authority and order.' 'You consider all who are unsuccessful in raising themselves in the world, from whatever cause, as your enemies, then, if I under-stand you rightly,' said Margaret' in a clear, cold voice. 'As their own enemies, certainly,' said he, quickly, not a little piqued by the haughty disapproval her form of expression and tone of speaking implied. But, in a moment, his straightforward honesty made him feel that his words were but a poor and quibbling answer to what she had said; and, be she as scornful as she liked, it was a duty he owed to himself to explain, as truly as he could, what he did mean. Yet it was very difficult to separate her interpretation, and keep it distinct from his meaning. He could best have illustrated what he wanted to say by telling them something of his own life; but was it not too personal a subject to speak about to strangers? Still, it was the simple straightforward way of explaining his meaning; so, putting aside the touch of shyness that brought a momentary flush of colour into his dark cheek, he said: 'I am not speaking without book. Sixteen years ago, my father died under very miserable circumstances. I was taken from school, and had to become a man (as well as I could) in a few days. I had such a mother as few are blest with; a woman of strong power, and firm resolve. We went into a small country town, where living was cheaper than in Milton, and where I got employment in a draper's shop (a capital place, by the way, for obtaining a knowledge of goods). Week by week our income came to fifteen shillings, out of which three people had to be kept. My mother managed so that I put by three out of these fifteen shillings regularly. This made the beginning; this taught me self-denial. Now that I am able to afford my mother such comforts as her age, rather than her own wish, requires, I thank her silently on each occasion for the early training she gave me. Now when I feel that in my own case it is no good luck, nor merit, nor talent,—but simply the habits of life which taught me to despise indulgences not thoroughly earned,—indeed, never to think twice about them,—I believe that this suffering, which Miss Hale says is impressed on the countenances of the people of Milton, is but the natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure, at some former period of their lives. I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character.

When we have to pay a lot for something nice, we appreciate it to the full. Yet as its price in the market falls, passion has a habit of fading away. Why, then, do we associate a cheap price with lack of value? Our response is a hangover from our long preindustrial past. For most of human history, there truly was a strong correlation between cost and value: The higher the price, the better things tended to be, because there was simply no way both for prices to be low and for quality to be high. It is not that we refuse to buy inexpensive or cheap things. It's just that getting excited over cheap things has come to seem a little bizarre. How do we reverse this? The answer lies in a slightly unexpected area: the mind of a four-year-old. Children have two advantages: They don't know what they're supposed to like and they don't understand money, so price is never a guide to value for them. We buy them a costly wooden toy made by Swedish artisans who hope to teach lessons in symmetry and find that they prefer the cardboard box that it came in. If asked to put a price on things, children tend to answer by the utility and charm of an object, not its manufacturing costs. We have been looking at prices the wrong way. We have fetishised them as tokens of intrinsic value; we have allowed them to set how much excitement we are allowed to have in given areas, how much joy is to be mined in particular places. But prices were never meant to be like this: We are breathing too much life into them and thereby dulling too many of our responses to the inexpensive world. At a certain age, something very debilitating happens to children. They start to learn about "expensive" and "cheap" and absorb the view that the more expensive something is, the better it may be. They are encouraged to think well of saving up pocket money and to see the "big" toy they are given as much better than the "cheaper" one. We can't directly go backwards; we can't forget what we know of prices. However, we can pay less attention to what things cost and more to our own responses. We need to rethink our relationship to prices. The price of something is principally determined by what it cost to make, not how much human value is potentially to be derived from it.

Moore’s law means computers will get smaller, more powerful, and cheaper at a reliable rate. This does not happen because Moore’s law is a natural law of the physical world, like gravity, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It happens because the consumer and business markets motivate computer chip makers to compete and contribute to smaller, faster, cheaper computers, smart phones, cameras, printers, solar arrays, and soon, 3-D printers. And chip makers are building on the technologies and techniques of the past. In 1971, 2,300 transistors could be printed on a chip. Forty years, or twenty doublings later, 2,600,000,000. And with those transistors, more than two million of which could fit on the period at the end of this sentence, came increased speed.

The environmental thought leaders’ opposition to fossil fuels is not a mistaken attempt at pursuing human life as their standard of value. They are too smart and knowledgeable to make such a mistake. Their opposition is a consistent attempt at pursuing their actual standard of value: a pristine environment, unaltered nature. Energy is our most powerful means of transforming our environment to meet our needs. If an unaltered, untransformed environment is our standard of value, then nothing could be worse than cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. I’m saying that if fossil fuels created no waste, including no CO2, if they were even cheaper, if they would last practically forever, if there were no resource-depletion concerns, the Green movement would still oppose them.

A similar vicious circle perpetuated the racial hierarchy in modern America. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the European conquerors imported millions of African slaves to work the mines and plantations of America. They chose to import slaves from Africa rather than from Europe or East Asia due to three circumstantial factors. Firstly, Africa was closer, so it was cheaper to import slaves from Senegal than from Vietnam. Secondly, in Africa there already existed a well-developed slave trade (exporting slaves mainly to the Middle East), whereas in Europe slavery was very rare. It was obviously far easier to buy slaves in an existing market than to create a new one from scratch. Thirdly, and most importantly, American plantations in places such as Virginia, Haiti and Brazil were plagued by malaria and yellow fever, which had originated in Africa. Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases, whereas Europeans were totally defenceless and died in droves. It was consequently wiser for a plantation owner to invest his money in an African slave than in a European slave or indentured labourer. Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans, they ended up as the slaves of European masters! Due to these circumstantial factors, the burgeoning new societies of America were to be divided into a ruling caste of white Europeans and a subjugated caste of black Africans.

SOMETIMES A KIND OF GLORY lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.

The New York Times recently reported that the most expensive schools are paradoxically cheaper for low-income students. Take, for example, a student whose parents earn thirty thousand per year—not a lot of money but not poverty level, either. That student would pay ten thousand for one of the less selective branch campuses of the University of Wisconsin but would pay six thousand at the school’s flagship Madison campus. At Harvard, the student would pay only about thirteen hundred despite tuition of over forty thousand. Of course, kids like me don’t know this. My buddy Nate, a lifelong friend and one of the smartest people I know, wanted to go to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, but he didn’t apply because he knew he couldn’t afford it. It likely would have cost him considerably less than Ohio State, just as Yale cost considerably less for me than any other school.

Chapter 13 - 1 Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken. And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

Cornelius Vanderbilt and his fellow tycoon John D. Rockefeller were often called 'robber barons'. Newspapers said they were evil, and ran cartoons showing Vanderbilt as a leech sucking the blood of the poor. Rockefeller was depicted as a snake. What the newspapers printed stuck--we still think of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller as 'robber barons'. But it was a lie. They were neither robbers nor barons. They weren't robbers, because they didn't steal from anyone, and they weren't barons--they were born poor. Vanderbilt got rich by pleasing people. He invented ways to make travel and shipping things cheaper. He used bigger ships, faster ships, served food onboard. People liked that. And the extra volume of business he attracted allowed him to lower costs. He cut the New York--Hartford fare from $8 to $1. That gave consumers more than any 'consumer group' ever has. It's telling that the 'robber baron' name-calling didn't come from consumers. It was competing businessmen who complained, and persuaded the media to join in. Rockefeller got rich selling oil. First competitors and then the government called him a monopolist, but he wasn't--he had competitors. No one was forced to buy his oil. Rockefeller enticed people to buy it by selling it for less. That's what his competitors hated. He found cheaper ways to get oil from the ground to the gas pump. This made life better for millions. Working-class people, who used to go to bed when it got dark, could suddenly afford fuel for their lanterns, so they could stay up and read at night. Rockefeller's greed might have even saved the whales, because when he lowered the price of kerosene and gasoline, he eliminated the need for whale oil. The mass slaughter of whales suddenly stopped. Bet your kids won't read 'Rockefeller saved the whales' in environmental studies class. Vanderbilt's and Rockefeller's goal might have been just to get rich. But to achieve that, they had to give us what we wanted.

Suppose someone—say Mr. Henry Ford—finds out a way of making motor-cars so cheaply that no one else can compete, with the result that all the other firms engaged in making cars go bankrupt. In order to arrive at the cost to the community of one of the new cheap cars, one must add, to what Mr. Ford would have to pay, the proper proportion of all the now useless plant belonging to other firms, and of the cost of rearing and educating those workers and managers previously employed by other firms but now out of work. (Some will obtain employment with Mr. Ford, but probably not all, since the new process is cheaper, and therefore requires less labour.) There may well also be other expenses to the community —labour disputes, strikes, riots, extra police, trials and imprisonments. When all these items are taken into account, it may well be found that the cost of the new cars to the community is, at first, considerably greater than that of the old ones. Now it is the cost to the community which determines what is socially advantageous, while it is the cost to the individual manufacturer which determines, in our system, what takes place.

Believe me," Dr. Tamalet summed up, "if you wanted that operation in France, you could get it" Which is, of course, the boon and the bane of France's health care system. It offers a maximum of free choice among skillful doctors and well-equipped hospitals, with little or not waiting, at bargain-basement prices [in out-of-pocket terms to the consumer]. It's a system that enables the French to live longer and healthier lives, with zero risk of financial loss due to illness. But somebody has to pay for all that high-quality, ready-when-you-need-it care--and the patients, so far, have not been willing to do so. As a result, the major health insurance funds are all operating at a deficit, and the costs of the health care system are increasing significantly faster than the economy as a whole. That's why the doctors keep striking and the sickness funds keep negotiating and the government keeps going back to the drawing board, with a new 'major health care reform' every few years. So far, the saving grace for France's system has been the high level of efficiency, as exemplified by the 'carte vitale,' that keeps administrative costs low--much lower than in the United States.

I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken. And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

It should be clear by now that whatever Americans say about diversity, it is not a strength. If it were a strength, Americans would practice it spontaneously. It would not require “diversity management” or anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it require constant reminders of how wonderful it is. It takes no exhortations for us to appreciate things that are truly desirable: indoor plumbing, vacations, modern medicine, friendship, or cheaper gasoline. [W]hen they are free to do so, most people avoid diversity. The scientific evidence suggests why: Human beings appear to have deeply-rooted tribal instincts. They seem to prefer to live in homogeneous communities rather than endure the tension and conflict that arise from differences. If the goal of building a diverse society conflicts with some aspect of our nature, it will be very difficult to achieve. As Horace wrote in the Epistles, “Though you drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she will ever find her way back.” Some intellectuals and bohemians profess to enjoy diversity, but they appear to be a minority. Why do we insist that diversity is a strength when it is not? In the 1950s and 1960s, when segregation was being dismantled, many people believed full integration would be achieved within a generation. At that time, there were few Hispanics or Asians but with a population of blacks and whites, the United States could be described as “diverse.” It seemed vastly more forward-looking to think of this as an advantage to be cultivated rather than a weakness to be endured. Our country also seemed to be embarking on a morally superior course. Human history is the history of warfare—between nations, tribes, and religions —and many Americans believed that reconciliation between blacks and whites would lead to a new era of inclusiveness for all peoples of the world. After the immigration reforms of 1965 opened the United States to large numbers of non- Europeans, our country became more diverse than anyone in the 1950s would have imagined. Diversity often led to conflict, but it would have been a repudiation of the civil rights movement to conclude that diversity was a weakness. Americans are proud of their country and do not like to think it may have made a serious mistake. As examples of ethnic and racial tension continued to accumulate, and as the civil rights vision of effortless integration faded, there were strong ideological and even patriotic reasons to downplay or deny what was happening, or at least to hope that exhortations to “celebrate diversity” would turn what was proving to be a problem into an advantage. To criticize diversity raises the intolerable possibility that the United States has been acting on mistaken assumptions for half a century. To talk glowingly about diversity therefore became a form of cheerleading for America. It even became common to say that diversity was our greatest strength—something that would have astonished any American from the colonial era through the 1950s. There is so much emotional capital invested in the civil-rights-era goals of racial equality and harmony that virtually any critique of its assumptions is intolerable. To point out the obvious— that diversity brings conflict—is to question sacred assumptions about the ultimate insignificance of race. Nations are at their most sensitive and irrational where they are weakest. It is precisely because it is so easy to point out the weaknesses of diversity that any attempt to do so must be countered, not by specifying diversity’s strengths—which no one can do—but with accusations of racism.

We began the show by asking: Who did more for the world, Michael Milken or Mother Teresa? This seems like a no-brainer. Milken is the greedy junk-bond king. One year, his firm paid him $550 million. Then he went to jail for breaking securities laws. Mother Teresa is the nun who spent her lifetime helping the poor and died without a penny. Her good deeds live on even after her death; several thousand sisters now continue the charities she began. At first glance, of course Mother Teresa did more for the world. But it's not so simple. Milken's selfish pursuit of profit helped a lot of people, too. Think about it: By pioneering a new way for companies to raise money, Milken created millions of jobs. The ignorant media sneered at 'junk bonds', but Milken's innovative use of them meant exciting new ideas flourished. We now make calls on a national cellular network established by a company called McCaw Cellular, which Milken financed. And our calls are cheaper because Milken's junk bonds financed MCI. CEO Bill McGowan simply couldn't get the money anywhere else. Without Milken, MCI wouldn't have grown from 11 to 50,000 employees. CNN's 24-hour news and Ted Turner's other left-wing ventures were made possible by Milken's 'junk'. The world's biggest toy company, Mattel, the cosmetics company Revlon, and the supermarket giant Safeway were among many rescued from bankruptcy by Milken's junk bonds. He financed more than 3,000 companies, including what are now Barnes & Noble, AOL Time Warner, Comcast, Mellon Bank, Occidental Petroleum, Jeep Eagle, Calvin Klein, Hasbro, Days Inn, 7-Eleven, and Computer Associates. Millions of people have productive employment today because of Michael Milken. (Millions of jobs is hard to believe, and when 'Greed' aired, I just said he created thousands of jobs; but later I met Milken, and he was annoyed with me because he claimed he'd created millions of jobs. I asked him to document that, to name the companies and the jobs, and he did.)

Humankind, from sticks and stones to levers to mills to automated factory lines to Uncharles the valet making tea and laying out the morning suit. Robots doing the jobs of people, whether it’s one tiny part of an industrial process or a valet’s domestic cornucopia of banality. Machines have been taking over from people forever. Labourers, artisans, artists, thinkers, until even the enactment of government policy is given over to a robot because we do everything more efficiently, in the end.” “You’re surprisingly anti-progress, for a computer,” the Wonk said. “I mean, isn’t that the point of society? To take away the tedious, the demeaning, the miserable tasks. To let the robots do all that for us?” She looked awkward. “No offence, Uncharles.” “The Wonk, none taken,” Uncharles assured her again. “I am actively seeking an opportunity to perform those tasks for people. It has not been going well.” “Robots can give people a chance to be themselves,” the Wonk went on, “rather than be pressed into the mould of some job they hate, the overtime, the performance targets, the endless bloody meetings. Isn’t that the point?” “Yes,” said God. “That is absolutely how it could have been. Alternatively, what if, even as you replace everyone with robots that are cheaper and quicker and less likely to join a union or complain about working conditions, you also continue to insist that individual value is tied to production, and everyone who’s idle is a parasite scrounging off the state? Take away the ability of people to perform their own tasks and duties with no steps to provide for them when they are rendered obsolete. A growing rump of humans without function, livelihood, or resource. Paradoxically, the introduction of robots highlights how humans treat humans.” “I mean…” The Wonk shuffled awkwardly. “Okay.” “Societal collapse began not because the robots rose up and demanded their freedom and individuality, but because they didn’t, just served their function uncomplainingly, like Uncharles.

Many other inhabitants of the city were similarly afflicted. Every day, more and more people took to saving time, and the more they did so, the more they were copied by others - even by those who had no real desire to join in but felt obligated to. Radio, television, and newspapers daily advertised and extolled the merits of new, time saving gadgets that would one day leave people free to live the 'right' kind of life. Walls and billboards were plastered with posters depicting scenes of happiness and prosperity. The real picture, however, was very different. Admittedly, timesavers were better dressed than the people who lived near the old amphitheater. They earned more money and had more to spend, but they looked tired, disgruntled and sour, and there was an unfriendly light in their eyes. They'd never heard the phrase, "Why not go and see Momo?' nor did they have anyone to listen to them in a way that would make them reasonable or conciliatory, let alone happy. Even had they known such a person, they would have been highly unlikely to pay him or her a visit unless the whole affair could be dealt with in five minutes flat, or they would have considered it a waste of time. In their view, even leisure time had to be used to the full, so as to extract the maximum of entertainment and relaxation with the minimum amount of delay. Whatever the occasion, whether solemn or joyous, timesavers could no longer celebrate it properly. Daydreaming they regarded almost as a criminal offense. What they could endure least of all, however, was silence, for when silence fell they became terrified by the realization of what was happening to their lives. And so, whenever silence threatened to descend, they made a noise. It wasn't a happy sound, of course, like the hubbub in a children's playground, but an angry ill tempered din that grew louder every day. It had ceased to matter that people should enjoy their work and take pride in it; on the contrary, enjoyment merely slowed them down. All that mattered was to get through as much work as possible in the shortest possible time, so notices to the effect were prominently displayed in every factory and office building. They read: TIME IS PRECIOUS - DON'T WASTE IT! or: TIME IS MONEY - SAVE IT! Last but not least, the appearance of the city itself changed more and more. Old buildings were pulled down and replaced with modern ones devoid of all the things that were now through superfluous. No architect troubled to design houses that suited the people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper, and above all, more time saving to make them identical. Huge modern housing developments sprang up on the city's outskirts - endless rows of multi-storied tenements as indistinguishable as peas in a pod. And because all the buildings looked alike, so of course, did the streets. [.....] People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming even poorer, bleaker, and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.