
10 quotes from The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read
This week’s Founders podcast is about The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis. Here are 10 quotes from The New New Thing that made me think:
- New Growth Theory argued, in abstruse mathematics, that wealth came from the human imagination.
- Why do people perpetually create for themselves the condition for their own dissatisfaction?
- Progress does not march forward like an army on parade; it crawls on its belly like a guerrilla.
- Back in 1921 Veblen had predicted that engineers would one day rule the U.S. economy. He argued that since the economy was premised on technology and the engineers were the only ones who actually understood how the technology worked, they would inevitably use their superior knowledge to seize power from the financiers and captains of industry who wound up on top at the end of the first round of the Industrial Revolution.
- People who are unhappy with the way things are tend to remain unhappy even after they have changed them. The nature of their unhappiness is such that change does not slake it.
- Maybe somewhere in the footnote it would be mentioned that he came from nothing, grew up poor, dropped out of high school, and made himself three or four billion dollars.
- It didn’t take long for Clark to become deeply irritated by the rules of American capitalism. In his opinion, the game was rigged so that the people who really mattered got the shaft. He believed in his bones that the people who mattered most were the brilliant engineers: the chefs who cooked up the new recipes. (Clark was a New Growth Theorist long before anyone in Silicon Valley heard of New Growth Theory.)
- For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn’t, someone else would.
- He didn’t buy U.S. Treasury bonds, or stock in companies outside of Silicon Valley, or for that matter stock in anything outside the outrageously volatile Internet sector.
- Moore’s law came with a social corollary: high-tech could not remain high-tech for long.
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