“The improved calculation of Mercury’s orbit was, in fact, a crucial first test of Einstein’s new theory. What moral to draw, then, of the non-existence of Vulcan and the subsequent triumph of general relativity? At the least this: science is unique among human ways of knowing because it is self-correcting. Every claim is provisional, which is to say each is incomplete in some small or, occasionally, truly consequential way. But in the midst of the fray, it is impossible to be sure what any gap between knowledge and nature might mean.”

“This focus on cities as the true engines of economics neatly explains both eurozone and pre-euro failures. European national currency zones were already too big – the eurozone made something already oversized even worse. The US is rich despite having one currency, and it suffers huge damaging cycles from being locked into that single currency zone. Long protected by exceptional rates of internal labour mobility (three times the rate within France), there are signs that US labour mobility is slowing, and a dollar-bloc handicap is becoming more visible.”

“We are in the very early days of what he calls the Fifth Wave. Institutions that developed in the age of industrialized, top-down mass media are losing legitimacy while new arrangements have yet to evolve. The challenge is to manage the hazardous transition to a new stage without falling into nihilistic chaos and destruction.”

“This is why I’ve made Guesstimate, a spreadsheet that’s as easy to use as existing spreadsheets, but works for uncertain values. For any cell you can enter confidence intervals (lower and upper bounds) that can represent full probability distributions. 5000 Monte Carlo simulations are performed to find the output interval for each equation, all in the browser.”