“Both the analyst and the foreign leaders the analyst is studying have worldviews that shape how they view events, how they understand things, how they filter all of the sensory input both from their immediate senses and from their innumerable memories and reduce a problem down to a cognitively managable set. And when those worldviews do not reconcile, the actions of someone from a different worldview can seem to be anything but rational. Saying that Trump supporters are “morons” or that they “want to be entertained” is reducing them to something irrational, something that we don’t NEED to understand, rather than grappling with the idea that they might be acting rationally!”

“Focusing on the institutions of impersonal exchange, it reaches a clear positive conclusion on the market-facilitating role of the Roman state because such institutions have unambiguously positive effects on markets. Moreover, being impersonal, these beneficial effects are also widely distributed across society instead of accruing disproportionately to better-connected individuals.”

“A Christian purpose aligns with our nature so well that it is useful to believe and behave “as if” it were true, and in the history of science, many assumptions that were chosen because they worked were later found to be true. Thus, assumptions often are used as contrivances, what Milton Friedman called “as if” assumptions that are not necessarily true, but just good working assumptions. For example, if you assume that individuals are self-interested you can explain many things that are otherwise difficult to explain. When Adam Smith introduced this in 1776, it seemed almost Machiavellian, but it turned out to be a better first-order approximation of individual motivation than any other. It is a miracle that Christianity promotes a societal arrangement as counterintuitive as the free market a couple thousand years before theory and data made this clear.”

“As fundamentalists who seek to return Muslims to the basics of the faith as taught by Mohammad, they see Sufism as comprising doctrines that emerged at a later period than that of the Prophet and his first followers.”