Companies often become victims of their own mythologies..

Since the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland wants to remain a part of Great Britain, and since Ireland itself has shown little interest in reun….

The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic..

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 b….

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….

When all is said and done, cheap gas is an illusion, because our reliance on gas creates a whole series of costs that aren't factored in to the pump ….

Steve Jobs was rare: a C.E.O. who actually had a huge impact on his company's fortunes. Contrary to corporate mythology, most C.E.O.s could be easily….

When Americans are asked to rank professions in terms of honesty and ethics, insurance agents routinely end up near the bottom of the list - somewher….

In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust..

It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are….

The value of a currency is, ultimately, what someone will give you for it - whether in food, fuel, assets, or labor. And that's always and everywhere….

The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let's try importing some human capital instead..

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..

The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which ev….

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 ….

Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few p….

Addictive behavior is kind of the inverse of procrastination: procrastination is about not being able to do what you want to do, addiction about not ….

Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment ….

Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing..

The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wi….

Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible..