39 Quotes by James Dale Davidson

The cybereconomy, rather than China, could well be the greatest economic phenomenon of the next thirty years.

The most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power is exercised. Often, subtle changes in climate, topography, microbes, and technology alter the logic of violence.

Violence is the ultimate boundary force on behavior; this, if you can understand how the logic of violence will change, you can usefully predict where people will be dropping or picking up the equivalent of one-hundred-dollar bills in the future.

Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.

You cannot friend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why.

If you try to put yourself in the position of a Roman of the late fifth century, it is easy to imagine how tempting it would have been to conclude that nothing had changed. That certainly was the optimistic conclusion. To have thought otherwise might have been frightening. And why come to a frightening conclusion when a reassuring one was at hand?

The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws.

To dare a thought is to risk being wrong.

Every social system, however strongly or weakly it clings to power, pretends that its rules will never be superseded.