Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on June 28, 2018
… is from page 127 of Steven Pinker’s excellent 2018 book, Enlightenment Now (footnote deleted; original emphasis):
Indeed, it’s a fallacy to think that people “need resources” in the first place. They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want. The human mind, with its recursive combinatorial power, can explore an infinite space of ideas, and is not limited by the quantity of any particular kind of stuff in the ground. When one idea no longer works, another can take its place. This doesn’t defy the laws of probability but obeys them.
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