• For a while, therefore, it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the United States - mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a daily drumbeat and become the new normal
• One person had one-eight-billionth of the power that humanity had. This assumed everyone had an equal amount of power, which wasn’t true, but it was serviceable for this kind of thinking. One-eight-billionth wasn’t a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things
• What remained was that feeling. Oh I will never forget it. When you lose all hope and all fear, then you become something not quite human. Whether better or worse than human I can’t say. But for an hour I was not a human being.
• The whole field and discipline of economics, by which we plan and justify what we do as a society, is simply riddled with absences, contradictions, logical flaws, and most important of all, axioms and false goals.
• Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real. `a smelly mass of unwashed anxious citizens, no doubt about it. But a society for sure. It's a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognise that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers, I say this unequivocally.
• Yes. You can short civilisation if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay you if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilisation, and civilisation (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long.
• That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.
• You can’t help being yourself. You’ll drag yourself with you all over the Earth, no matter how far you flee. You can’t escape yourself even if you want to. If what you fear is losing yourself, rest easy.