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.

Cynicism is the last refuge of those who don't want to do the work of creating a better society.

I, from the luxury of my laptop computer, can summon extraordinary bargains on everything I want, and I can also move my savings anywhere. This ability to choose more broadly and to switch more easily is the central fact of modern economic life.

True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going.

America has become the most unequal society among advanced countries, and rich people are now free to spend as much money on political campaigns as they wish.

I think that it's difficult to talk about large questions of economics or social policy without understanding the building blocks of society. And those building blocks are organizations, the people who run them, and the people who work in them.

I think it's hard to have a brand portal and an economy of trustworthiness in one of them that sloshes over into another. But saying that there will be only a limited number of these giant brand portals doesn't mean a limited number of companies; it doesn't mean that everybody's going to be working for these companies. Quite the opposite. Most of us will be working through much smaller entities that simply use these portals as vehicles for getting and identifying customers.