In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.

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 being able to not do what you don't want to do (drink, use drugs, etc.)

The oil market is especially sensitive even to a hint of expansion or contraction in supply.

In effect, dividing your attention means that neither (or none) of the things you're working on is really getting the full effect of your intelligence, and that it in the end takes you longer than it would if you did one thing at a time.

Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.

Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.