There is a distinction between an individual life and a statistical life. Let a 6-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an oper… - Thomas Schelling

What this book is about is a kind of analysis that is characteristic of a large part of the social sciences, especially the more theoretical part. That kind of analysis explores the relation between the behavior of individuals who compromise some social aggregate, and the characteristics of the aggregate.<p>These situations, in which people's behavior or people's choices depend on the behavior or choices of other people, are the ones that usually don't permit any simple summation or extrapolation of the aggregates. To make that connection we usually have to look at the system of interaction between individuals and their environment, that is, between individuals and other individuals or between individuals and the collectivity.

By "market" is meant the entire complex of institutions within which people buy and sell and hire and are hired and borrow and lend and trade and contract and shop around to find bargains.

The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.