The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology ... . For while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, MA.

In the future the optimal form of industrial organization will be neither small companies nor large ones but network structures that share the advantages of both.

Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up.

The nation will continue to be a central pole of identification, even if more and more nations come to share common economic and political forms of organization.

The desire for economic prosperity is itself not culturally determined but almost universally shared

Neoclassical economics ... has uncovered important truths about the nature of money and markets because its fundamental model of rational self-interested human behavior is correct about 80% of the time.

As a piece of travel literature alone, 'The Ends of the Earth' succeeds in providing a tangible sense of the sweaty, smelly reality of many exotic points on the map, with glimpses of their cruelty but also, occasionally, of beauty and human kindness. As a piece of analysis, it is deeply thought-provoking.