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

In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.

In terms of productivity - that is, how much a worker produces in an hour - there's little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth.

Framing effects can be very influential, and to the degree that you can think of a task as close rather than distant, you're more likely to actually get it done.

The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let's try importing some human capital instead.

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

Auto repair, piloting, skiing, perhaps even management: these are skills that yield to application, hard work, and native talent. But forecasting an uncertain future and deciding the best course of action in the face of that future are much less likely to do so. And much of what we've seen so far suggests that a large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than even the most skilled "decision maker."