In terms of productivity - that is, how much a worker produces in an hour - there's little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth.
Congressional Republicans themselves have vehemently defended the idea that preexisting conditions should not be used to deny people insurance.
The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes.
The oil market is especially sensitive even to a hint of expansion or contraction in supply.
The stock market has an insidious effect on C.E.O.s' moods, because of its impact not just on their companies but on their own bank accounts.
Traditionally, tours were a means of promoting a record. Today, the record promotes the tour.
Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.
Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.
What the investment community does like is short-term measures designed to boost share prices.
The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn't make people happy.
Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author's own problems with finishing the piece.
Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future.
Popular as Keynesian fiscal policy may be, many economists are skeptical that it works. They argue that fine-tuning the economy is a virtually impossible task, and that fiscal-stimulus programs are usually too small, and arrive too late, to make a difference.
If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.
The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential.
Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.
Art collecting has traditionally been the domain of wealthy individuals in search of rewards beyond the purely financial.
Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward.
If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.
The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let's try importing some human capital instead.
If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.
Pop music thrives on repetition. You know a song's a hit when you've heard it so often that you'll be happy never to hear it again.
In American politics, 'Europe' is usually a code word for 'big government.'
