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Michael Lewis Books

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Liar's Poker

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Moneyball

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The Fifth Risk

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Flash Boys

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“Stawiają też hipotezę, że nadmierny smutek może stanowić obciążenie dla innych, a zatem może być dysfunkcyjny. Problem związany z rozróżnieniem pomiędzy sygnalizowaniem innym, że potrzebuje się pomoc, a budzeniem relacji odrzucenia niektórzy psychologowie rozwiązują w taki sposób, że emocje, które prowadzą do uzyskania pomocy, nazywają "normalnym smutkiem", a te, które powodują odrzucenie - "depresją". Takie teleologiczne rozwiązanie może jednak wzbudzać pewne zastrzeżenia naukowe.”

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“Jednakże zapytanie o motywy, badani mówili o uget - pozostaje niejasne, czy autorka chce to tłumaczyć jako "przykre uczucie", czy "żal", ale w każdym razie jej zdaniem słowo to sugeruje brzemię, które trzeba nieść, dopóki nie znajdzie się ofiary (nie musi to być sprawca krzywdy) i nie zetnie jej głowy. Rosaldo mówi wyraźnie, że zabijanie nie zawsze wynika z zemsty; często jego powodem jest potrzeba zrzucenia z serca wielkiego ciężaru. Edward Schieffelin (1976; 1985b) opisał podobne reakcje zaobserwowane u przedstawicieli Kaluli z Nowej Gwinei. Członkowie tego ludu czasami reagują na stratęzłością, co znajduje wyraz w katartycznym obrzędzie, podczas któego tancerze śpiewający o stracie i ją opłakujący zostają spaleni przez rozgniewanych widzów. Stratą bywa śmierć lub odejście ukochanej osoby; nie musi jej spowodować konkretny człowiek, by wzbudzić taką reakcję. Krzywda lubstrata prowadzi do pełnego wściekłości tupania, wrzasku i prawgnienia rekompensaty(Schieffelin, 1985a), nawet jeśli nie ma pewności, że ktoś jest za nią odpowiedzialny.”

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“Briggs stwierdziła również, że Eskimosi reagowali złością i odrzuceniem, kiedy ona sama cierpiałą na rozproszony smutek czy depresję, dla których nie mieli zgodnej ze skryptem reakcji. Badani przez Abu-Lughod (1986) Beduini potwierdzają pogląd, że społeczeństwa wypracowują mechanizmy ograniczające domaganie się od nich pomocy, co kojarzy się z naszym powiedzeniem "Głowa do góry!". Autorka ta uważa, że często reakcją na stratę bywa złość, a nie smutek, ponieważ smutna osoba może prosić o pomoc, co u dorosłego jest uznawane za słabość - tylko dzieciom wolno dawać wyraz podatności na zranienie.”

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“Wielu historyków opisało proces modernizacji, który spowodował częstsze złoszczenie się na nieszczęśliwych i niechęć do udzielania im pomocy (MacFarlane, 1970; Lindemann, 1990). Wiązało się to ze wzrastającą niechęcią do dobroczynności i z potępieniem ubogich, ale tłumaczy też zmieniające się postawy wobec smutku. Wydaje się zatem, że to, jak społeczeństwa myślą o smutku, ma coś wspólnego z tym, jak myślą o pomaganiu. W społeczeństwach bardziej kolektywistycznych niż nasze smutki często traktuje się jako zasługujące na reakcję, lecz takie społeczeństwa stawiają granice swoim zobowiązaniom, czego przejawem jest brak słownictwa dotyczącego smutku, albo też wyodrębnianie smutków, w odniesieniu do których nie można oczekiwać reakcji zbiorowej. W społeczeństwach mających inne mechanizmy ograniczania roszczeń smutnego człowieka wobec grupy, takie jak mechanizmy wstydu, za których pomocą Beduini blokują skargi, lub mechanizmy poczucia winy, przy których użyciu współcześni mieszkańcy Ameryki Północnej skłaniają ludzi do samodzielnego raczenia sobie z problemami, jest więcej możliwości mówienia o różnych rodzajach smutku. We wszystkich wypadkach dyskusja dotycząca smutku to jednocześnie dyskusja o granicy między odpowiedzialnością jednostki i grupy. Zaintrygowanie funkcjonalistów z Ameryki Północnej tym, czy "celem" smutku jest błaganie o pomoc, o raz ich trudności w obliczu dowodów, że smutek w naszej kulturze często prowadzi od odrzucenia, stanowią przejaw tej dyskusji. Nadanie człowiekowi, który wymaga nadmiernej pomocy, etykiety "zaburzonego" lub "chorego" łagodzi nasze poczucie winy związane z niechęcią do pomagania potrzebującym, pozwalając zepchnąć tego człowieka na margines i włączyć do systemu medycznego. Rozróżnienie między "smutkiem" a "depresją" często wytycza granicę między sytuacjami, kiedy chcemy lub nie chcemy udzielać pomocy.”

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“Omawiałam gdzie indziej (Stearns, 1988) użyteczność nadania wysokiej wartości biernej postawie w silnie rozwarstwionym, złożonym społeczeństwie, w którym olbrzymia większość ludzi musi zostać poddana socjalizacji, ązeby stała sięposzłuszna i wyzbyła się inicjatywy. Gdy istnieje taka hierarchia, ci którzy są na górze drabiny społecznej, mogą być nakłaniani do przekształcania smutku w złość (White, 1998). White cytuje europejską opowieść średniowieczną, zalecającą szlachcicowi przekształcenie emocji: "Przestań płakać [...] jeśli jego śmierć budzi twój żal, pomścij ją [...] [obróć ich radość] w żal". (s.141). W XI i XII wieku, kiedy sytuacja w Europie była dość stabilna, złość coraz częściej spostrzegano jako niezbędny przywilej sprawujących władzę, a u niemających władzy uznawano ją za niestosowną i śmieszną (White, 1998; Freedman, 1998; Buhrer-Thierry, 1998). Zatem historycznie rzecz biorąc, w Europie smutek był albo aktywny, albo bierny, zależnie od klasy społecznej, do której należał dany człowiek.”

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“[...] poszukując podstawowego smutku, nie zauważają kulturowego znaczenia faktu, że ich badani różnicują to, co robią, kiedy są smutni (to znaczy podejmują aktywność), od tego, co ich zdaniem w takiej sytuacji robią inni (to znaczy popadają w apatię). Tłumaczą tę różnicę jako skutek zniekształcenia poznawczego. Nie wyjaśniają mechanizmu kryjącego się za tym zniekształceniem, polegającego na tym, że projektujemy "złą" bierną reakcję na innych, a sobie przypisujemy "dobrą", aktywną reakcję; [...].”

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“Przede wszystkich badania Ekmana opierają się na słowach, jakich używają badacze i badani do opisania emocji (Ekman, Friesen i Ellsworth, 1972). Ponieważ Paul Ekman fałszywie interpretuje cały problem przekładu, dyskutowany później przez antropologów (Heelas, 1986), nie można mieć pewności, co "smutek" oznaczał dla osób badanych przez Ekamana, ale jest dosyć jasne, że anglojęzyczni tłumacze wybrali słowa implikujące rezygnację, a nie walkę. [...] Nie dowodzi jednak istnienia uniwersalnego, podstawowego i odrębnego uczucia smutku.”

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“Alkohol, który we wczesnych fazach prowadzi do podwyższenia nastroju i wyzbycia się zahamowań, później wywołuje depresję i nieuzasadnioną agresję. Amfetamina może powodować przytłumienie afektu, a także złość. To samo dotyczy kokainy. Środki uspokajające i nasenne wzbudzają reakcje złości, ale mogą też wywoływać okresową depresję. Ponieważ te substancje powodują zmiany w neuroprzekaźnikach lub błonach komórkowych, ich jednoczesny wpływ na obie emocje każe wątpić w teorię o biologicznej odrębności tych emocji.”

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“Tylko dzięki współpracy między różnymi dyscyplinami będzie można znaleźć odpowiedzi na tak złożone pytania. Jak sądzę, przyszłe badania smutku czy innych emocji (a obecnie jest mniej jasne, czym są "emocje", niż wówczas gdy kiedy publikowano pierwsze wydanie tego podręcznika) przekonają nas, że biologowie, psychologowie, psychoanalitycy, antropologowie, językoznawcy [...] mogą nam pomóc w udzielaniu odpowiedzi na te pytania. Musimy podejmować wysiłki, by spostrzegać nasze rozważania jako artefakt, a nie poddawać je reifikacji.”

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“Weirdly—but as Danny and Amos had suspected—the further the winning number was from the number on a person's lottery ticket, the less regret they felt. "In defiance of logic, there is a definite sense that one comes closer to winning the lottery when one's ticket number is similar to the number that won," Danny wrote in a memo to Amos, summarizing their data. In another memo, he added that "the general point is that the same state of affairs (objectively) can be experienced with very different degrees of misery," depending on how easy it is to imagine that things might have turned out differently. Regret was sufficiently imaginable that people conjured it out of situations they had no control over. But it was of course at its most potent when people might have done something to avoid it. What people regretted, and the intensity with which they regretted it, was not obvious.”

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Book:The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
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“The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. "I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?'" he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? "If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.”

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Book:The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
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“Buy potatoes,” he said. “Gotta hop.” Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them.”

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Book:Liar's Poker
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“Amos [Tversky] liked to say that if you are asked to do anything—go to a party, give a speech, lift a finger—you should never answer right away, even if you are sure that you want to do it. Wait a day, Amos said, and you’ll be amazed how many of those invitations you would have accepted yesterday you’ll refuse after you have had a day to think it over. A corollary to his rule for dealing with demands upon his time was his approach to situations from which he wished to extract himself. A human being who finds himself stuck at some boring meeting or cocktail party often finds it difficult to invent an excuse to flee. Amos’s rule, whenever he wanted to leave any gathering, was to just get up and leave. Just start walking and you’ll be surprised how creative you will become and how fast you’ll find the words for your excuse, he said. His attitude to the clutter of daily life was of a piece with his strategy for dealing with social demands. Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away, he said. Everything that didn’t seem to Amos obviously important he chucked, and thus what he saved acquired the interest of objects that have survived a pitiless culling.”

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Book:The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
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“Even so, most of the stories people told about Amos [Tversky] had less to do with what came out of his mouth than with the unusual way he moved through the world. He kept the hours of a vampire. He went to bed when the sun came up and woke up at happy hour. He ate pickles for breakfast and eggs for dinner. He minimized quotidian tasks he thought a waste of time—he could be found in the middle of the day, having just woken up, driving himself to work while shaving and brushing his teeth in the rearview mirror. “He never knew what time of the day it was,” said his daughter, Dona. “It didn’t matter. He’s living in his own sphere and you just happened to encounter him there.” He didn’t pretend to be interested in whatever others expected him to be interested in—God help anyone who tried to drag him to a museum or a board meeting. “For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like,” Amos liked to say, plucking a line from the Muriel Spark novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. “He just skipped family vacations,” says his daughter. “He’d come if he liked the place. Otherwise he didn’t.” The children didn’t take it personally: They loved their father and knew that he loved them. “He loved people,” said his son Oren. “He just didn’t like social norms. A lot of things that most human beings would never think to do, to Amos simply made sense. For instance, when he wanted to go for a run he . . . went for a run. No stretching, no jogging outfit or, for that matter, jogging: He’d simply strip off his slacks and sprint out his front door in his underpants and run as fast as he could until he couldn’t run anymore. “Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.” What all those who came to know Amos eventually realized was that the man had a preternatural gift for doing only precisely what he wanted to do. Varda Liberman recalled visiting him one day and seeing a table with a week’s worth of mail on it. There were tidy little stacks, one for each day, each filled with requests and entreaties and demands upon Amos’s time: job offers, offers of honorary degrees, requests for interviews and lectures, requests for help with some abstruse problem, bills. When the new mail came in Amos opened anything that interested him and left the rest in its daily pile. Each day the new mail arrived and shoved the old mail down the table. When a pile reached the end of the table Amos pushed it, unopened, off the edge into a waiting garbage can. “The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.” “I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that,” recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. “And he would say, ‘No. You don’t.’ And I thought: lucky man!”

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Book:The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
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“The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally, to 4:1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” says Zelman. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was four to one. In Los Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami, eight-point-five to one.”

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Book:The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
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“When Steve Eisman stumbled into this new, rapidly growing industry of specialty finance, the mortgage bond was about to be put to a new use: making loans that did not qualify for government guarantees. The purpose was to extend credit to less and less creditworthy homeowners, not so that they might buy a house but so that they could cash out whatever equity they had in the house they already owned.”

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“Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. “It was a fast-buck business,” says Jacobs. “Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.”

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“It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight,” he wrote. “There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble’s inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud…. The FBI reports mortgage-related fraud is up fivefold since 2000.” Bad behavior was no longer on the fringes of an otherwise sound economy; it was its central feature.”

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“Long Beach Savings was the first existing bank to adopt what was called the “originate and sell” model. This proved such a hit—Wall Street would buy your loans, even if you would not!—that a new company, called B&C mortgage, was founded to do nothing but originate and sell.”

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“By early 2005 all the big Wall Street investment banks were deep into the subprime game. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley all had what they termed “shelves” for their subprime wares, with strange names like HEAT and SAIL and GSAMP, that made it a bit more difficult for the general audience to see that these subprime bonds were being underwritten by Wall Street’s biggest names.”

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“Back in July 2003, he’d written them a long essay on the causes and consequences of what he took to be a likely housing crash: “Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles—or major deflations—on any national scale,” he’d said. “This is ridiculous, of course…. In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10% of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default. During the 1930s, housing prices collapsed nationwide by roughly 80%.”

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Book:The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
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“There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry’s purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received protection against the default of a billion dollars’ worth of bonds. He’d either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he’d insured proved good, or a billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad. But of course Mike Burry didn’t own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to “insure” it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve Eisman, a credit default swap wasn’t insurance at all but an outright speculative bet against the market—and this was the second way to think about it.”

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“For that purpose, partly as the result of Ranieri’s persistent lobbying, two new facilities had sprung up in the federal government alongside Ginnie Mae. They guaranteed the mortgages that did not qualify for the Ginnie Mae stamp. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (called Freddie Mac) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (called Fannie Mae) between them, by giving their guarantees, were able to transform most home mortgages into government-backed bonds.”

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Book:Liar's Poker
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“The relationship between the people and their money in California is such that you can pluck almost any city at random and enter a crisis. San Jose has the highest per capita income of any city in the United States, after New York. It has the highest credit rating of any city in California with a population over 250,000. It is one of the few cities in America with a triple-A rating from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, but only because its bondholders have the power to compel the city to levy a tax on property owners to pay off the bonds. The city itself is not all that far from being bankrupt.”

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“How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation? He tried, but his English in-laws just looked at him strangely. They understood that someone else had just lost a great deal of money and Ben had just made a great deal of money, but never got much past that. "I can't really talk to them about it," he says. "They're English.”

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“More of America’s problems than even DJ had imagined could be better understood and addressed with better access to the right information. The problem of excessive police force was another example. After a white policeman shot a defenseless black man in Ferguson, Missouri, the White House convened police chiefs from ten American cities, along with their data. The policing data was local and difficult to get ahold of—and that was DJ’s point. He wanted to show what might be possible if the government collected the information. “We asked the question: What causes excessive use of police force?” Combing the data from the ten cities, a team of researchers from several American universities found a pattern that would be hard to spot with the naked eye. Police officers who had just come from an emotionally fraught situation—a suicide, or a domestic abuse call in which a child was involved—were more likely to use excessive force. Maybe the problem wasn’t as simple as a bad cop. Maybe it was the emotional state in which the cop had found himself. “Dispatch sent them right back out without time to decompress,” said DJ. “Give them a break in between and maybe they behave differently.”

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“Al realizar predicciones y juicios en condiciones de incertidumbre, la gente no parece seguir el cálculo de probabilidades ni la teoría estadística de la predicción. Más bien se basa en un limitado número de heurísticas que a veces dan lugar a juicios razonables y otras veces conducen a graves y sistemáticos errores.”

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“Many thrifts layered a billion dollars of brand-new loans on top of their existing, disastrous hundred million dollars of old loss-making loans, in a hope that the new would offset the old. Each new purchase of mortgage bonds (which was identical to making a loan) was like the last act of a desperate man. The strategy was wildly irresponsible, for the fundamental problem (borrowing short term and lending long term) hadn’t been remedied. The hypergrowth only meant that the next thrift crisis would be larger. But the thrift managers were not thinking that far in advance. They were simply trying to keep the door to the shop open. That explains why thrifts continued to buy mortgage bonds even as they sold their loans.”

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Book:Liar's Poker
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