Similarly, payments for a dead soldier amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death. This statistical value of a life in the US amounts to circa $6.5 million.

If you're injured in an automobile accident, and you sue the driver, you get much more for your injury than if you're fighting for your country. There's a double standard here.

The IMF is a more complicated issue. I think there is a broad sentiment among both the left and the right that the IMF may be doing more harm than good. On the right, there's the view that it represents a form of corporate welfare that is counter to the IMF's own ideology of markets. But anybody who has watched government from the inside recognizes that governments need institutions, need ways to respond to crises. If the IMF weren't there, it would probably be reinvented. So the issue is fundamentally reform.

I've always been sceptical about the notion that the market is a person you can engage in an argument with, and that that person is an intelligent, rational, well-intentioned person: it is fantasy. We know that ... the market is subject to irrational optimism and pessimism, and is vindictive ... You're dealing with a crazy man ... Having got what he wants he will still kill you.

The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities.

The decision-making process in the White House does not let most issues get up to the President. The Council thought opening up global markets to derivatives that would destabilize other countries wasn't likely to create a lot of jobs in the U.S. and might adversely affect U.S. interests by causing global economic instability.

The grand larceny that occurred in Russia, the corruption that resulted in nine or ten people getting enormous wealth through loans-for-shares, was condoned because it allowed the reelection of Boris Yeltsin.