Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.
If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we’d all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.
Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.
Solyndra’s failure isn’t a reason for the government to give up on alternative energy, any more than the failure of Pets.com during the Internet bubble means that venture capital should steer clear of tech projects.
The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich.
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.
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.
If you work for Google or Apple, stock options give you a chance to share in the increasing value of the company. In the N.F.L., nothing like this happens; the players, though rich, are just working stiffs like the rest of us.
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.
The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.
In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.
Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they’re greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly.
Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn’t make for a compelling thriller.
Besides great climates and lovely beaches, California and Greece share a fondness for dysfunctional politics and feckless budgeting.
As technology improves, on-screen avatars look more and more like real people. When they start looking too real, though, we pull away. These almost-humans aren’t quite right; they look creepy, like zombies.
In the auto industry, there’s one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster.
Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment by fathers to the future well-being of their families.