Growth is good, if only because runts eventually get eaten. But forced growth, accelerated growth, artificial growth—that tends to backfire.

Edison wasn’t a grand planner. He was a prolific tinkerer, combining parts in ways he didn’t quite understand, confident that little discoveries along the way would be combined and leveraged into more meaningful inventions.

big gap between expectations and reality.

Same with the Reagan revolution. Almost 80 percent of Americans had high trust in the government in 1964. Then the 1970s happened. Years of high inflation and high unemployment meant Americans were ready to listen to a politician who said the government was the cause of their problems, not the solution. The big takeaway here is that we really have

Spending on road construction went from 2 percent of GDP in 1920 to over 6 percent in 1933 (versus less than 1 percent today). The Department of Highway Transportation tells a story of how quickly projects began: Construction began on August 5, 1933, in Utah on the first highway project under the act. By August 1934, 16,330 miles of new roadway pro

After just five weeks a human embryo has a brain, a beating heart, a pancreas, a liver, and a gallbladder. By birth, a baby has 100 billion neurons, 250 trillion synapses, 11 cooperating organ systems, and a personality. It’s staggeringly complex.

He wrote: “The moral of this is not that ignorance is an advantage. But some of us are too much attracted by the thought of rare things and forget the law of averages in diagnosis.”

Vannevar Bush, who ran the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, controversially suggested the medical advances that came about from the war—most notably the production and use of antibiotics—may have saved more lives than were lost during the war.

Hill discovered the same, but for our bodies. He called them “moral factors.”