Most Americans stopped looking at what was happening through a variety of coping mechanisms - starting with women entering paid work and then everyone working longer hours and using their homes for raising equity and generating more money through debt. The typical household basically staved off the day of reckoning.

Now, inventiveness and empathy, those qualities, if they're together in the same person, you've got an entrepreneurial genius. But they do tend to be slightly separate.

What characteristics are most important in creative workers? One quality you need is inventiveness. You need to be able to take whatever product or service you are providing and figure out ways of making it better, faster, cheaper. The other quality is empathy and insight into what people might want, even though they don't even know their wants, probably because there's no product or service to test their wants.

You can't create a political movement out of pabulum.

Social change occurs when the gap between the ideals that people hold and the reality that they see every day gets too large.

Look, any cut in greenhouse gases is going to be expensive for American consumers, who are in no mood to bear additional costs.

Standing up to bullies is the hallmark of a civilized society.