In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals, herd together for protection.
Medical tourism can be considered a kind of import: instead of the product coming to the consumer, as it does with cars or sneakers, the consumer is going to the product.
You can't fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.
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.
If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.
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.
Discussions of health care in the U.S. usually focus on insurance companies, but, whatever their problems, they're not the main driver of health-care inflation: providers are.
I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.
Tough times have always lent themselves to nativist sentiments and closed-door policies. But in the case of highly skilled immigrants, these policies are a recipe for stagnation.
If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.
Critics of consumer capitalism like to think that consumers are manipulated and controlled by those who seek to sell them things, but for the most part it's the other way around: companies must make what consumers want and deliver it at the lowest possible price.
Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.
You might think of consumption as a fairly passive activity, but buying new products and services is actually pretty risky, at least if you value your time and money.
Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.
Markets work best when there's lots of information available and a historical track record to go on; they excel at predicting things like horse races, election outcomes, and box-office results. But they're bad at predicting things like who will be the next Supreme Court nominee, as that depends on the whim of the president.
The paradox of Steve Jobs's career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers - he was famously dismissive of market research - yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.
The problem with venality in business is that getting outraged about it makes it easy to miss the systemic problems that venality often disguises.
For a crowd to be smart, the people in it need to be not only diverse in their perspectives but also, relatively speaking, independent of each other. In other words, you need people to be thinking for themselves, rather than following the lead of those around them.
Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads of central banks.
Punk rock has never really had much patience with musical virtuosity. Actually, it'd be more accurate to say that for most of its history, punk has been actively hostile to virtuosity.
