Art collecting has traditionally been the domain of wealthy individuals in search of rewards beyond the purely financial.

In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals, herd together for protection.

Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.

One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.

In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.

Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.

Lower oil prices won't, by themselves, topple the mullahs in Iran. But it's significant that, historically, when oil prices have been low, Iranian reformers have been ascendant and radicals relatively subdued, and vice versa when prices have been high.