Questions like, "Is my suit OK?", or "Is my job performance satisfactory?", are impossible to think about in the absence of a suitable frame of reference. For an interview suit to serve its purpose, it must make you look good relative to other candidates for the job you want. For your job performance to be satisfactory, it must compare favorably with the performance of others who want the same promotion you do. As Charles Darwin saw clearly, much of life is graded on the curve, and conventional economic models completely ignore that fact.

Questions like, "Is my suit OK?", or "Is my job performance satisfactory?", are impossible to think about in the absence of a suitable frame of reference. For an interview suit to serve its purpose, it must make you look good relative to other candidates for the job you want. For your job performance to be satisfactory, it must compare favorably with the performance of others who want the same promotion you do. As Charles Darwin saw clearly, much of life is graded on the curve, and conventional economic models completely ignore that fact.

Pass down values every day through your actions, your words and your time with your kids.

When people bump up against one another in the course of pursuing their goals, it is in everyone's interest to resolve any resulting problems in the least costly ways possible.

The link between rational individual behavior and collectively desirable outcomes is extremely tenuous.

The most common mistake we make as teachers is attempting to tell our students too much.

We could curtail private spending by several trillion dollars a year without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. That would be more than enough to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and eliminate government indebtedness once and for all.