Quotes by William Ridley

“I put no stock in religion. By the word religion I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of god. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves, and goodness. What God desires is here [mind] and here [heart] and what you decide to do every day will make you a good man...or not.””

“The moral of this story is that autocrats get too much credit for episodes of increased economic freedom,’ wrote William Easterly.””

“The real cause of poverty today – now that it is avoidable – is the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights, says William Easterly.””

“A series of papers by the Princeton economist Dani Rodrik and his colleagues tried to shed light on the impact of policy decisions on economic growth, but found that ‘most instances of economic reform do not produce growth accelerations’, and ‘most growth accelerations are not preceded or accompanied by major changes in economic policies, institutional arrangements, political circumstances, or external conditions’. The economist William Easterly points out that the evidence for a change of leadership being the cause of a growth miracle anywhere in the developing world is wholly lacking: the timing simply does not match. The effect of leaders on growth rates, he says, is close to zero, a conclusion that is ‘almost too shocking to be believed’. South””

“Likewise, when the credit card took off in California in the 1960s, driven by Joseph Williams of Bank of America, there was nothing new about buying on credit. It was as old as Babylon. There was not even anything new about charge cards. Diner’s Club had been issuing cards for the convenience of restaurant users since the early 1950s and department stores for longer than that. What the BankAmericard achieved, especially once it emerged as Visa from the chaos of the mass mailings in the late 1960s, under Dee Hock’s reinvention, was the democratisation of credit. The electronic possibility that your card could be authorised for a purchase anywhere in the country or even the world was a powerful lubricant to specialisation and exchange in the economy of the late twentieth century, allowing consumers to express their choice to borrow against future earnings when it made sense. There was, of course, irresponsibility, but the credit card did not lead, as most intellectual grandees had feared,””