There are certainly valid reasons for taking a company private, and it's also possible that C.E.O.s perform better when monitored by a small number of owners in a private company rather than by the dispersed and often uninterested shareholders of a public corporation.

The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization's benefits.

If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources.

Traditionally, tours were a means of promoting a record. Today, the record promotes the tour.

As technology improves, on-screen avatars look more and more like real people. When they start looking too real, though, we pull away. These almost-humans aren't quite right; they look creepy, like zombies.

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

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