p.12 what makes for adaptive efficiency?
 By adaptive efficiency I mean the ability of some societies to adjust flexibly in the face of shock and evolve institutions that effectively deal with altered reality... I think in terms of fifty or a hundred years, and then I can think about whether you have really evolved a society that has the ability to withstand shock, to overcome continual problems.

p.12-13 what makes for adaptive efficiency? ...Western Europe and the United States are adept at what I would call adaptive efficiency. They are economies and societies that have withstood all kinds of shocks, wars, and radical fundamental change, and that have managed throughout to adapt their institutional structure to make it so they have had continuous growth over long periods of time. That is what we really want to have... in England and in Europe, and in the United States, we have evolved an institutional structure in which the informal norms of behavior, more important that the formal rules, have built into the body politic this adaptability. This structure tends to provide a set of guiding principles that constrain the way in which we evolve and have made for this adaptive efficiency. The fundamental obstacle to creating such policies is informal norms geared to personalized exchange that inhibit the growth of impersonal exchange

p.13-14 Economic history is an endless depressing tale of miscalculation, leading to famine, starvation, deceit and warfare, death, economic stagnation and decline, and indeed, the disappearance of whole civilizations. [JLJ - but do the economists hold themselves responsible? No - this is someone else's problem than theirs.]

p.14-15 Let me go over three ways we get it wrong--ways that we have gotten it wrong in the past, get it wrong in the present, and will get it wrong in the future. The first is the straightforward one, which should be clear by now: we never really understand reality... The second concerns belief systems... Whether the beliefs are derived from religions... whether they're derived from elegant models... or whether they are ad hoc bits and pieces of beliefs that characterize the way in which most of us, including most politicians, make everyday choices, they mean that we are going to get it wrong much of the time, particularly... as the world is changing on us.
 The third way we get it wrong is... that we use tools to control our world that are very blunt instruments.

p.19 there is no way to make intelligent predictions of long-range change. And that is because we cannot know today what we will learn tomorrow and believe tomorrow.