Campaigns fail if they waste resources courting voters who are unpersuadable or already persuaded. Their most urgent task is to find and persuade the few voters who are genuinely undecided and the larger number who are favorably disposed but need a push to actually vote.

In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.

Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.

The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.

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

Critics of consumer capitalism like to think that consumers are manipulated and controlled by those who seek to sell them things, but for the most part it's the other way around: companies must make what consumers want and deliver it at the lowest possible price.

Technological innovation has dramatically lowered the cost of computing, making it possible for large numbers of consumers to own powerful new technologies at reasonably low prices.