Until the nineteen-seventies, Western countries paid little attention to corruption overseas, and bribery was seen as an unpleasant but necessary part of doing business there. In some European countries, businesses were even allowed to deduct bribes as an expense.

Behavioral economists have shown that a sizable percentage of people are willing to pay real money to punish people who are taking from a common pot but not contributing to it. Just to insure that shirkers get what they deserve, we are prepared to make ourselves poorer.

Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.

Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future.

Unlike most government programs, Social Security and, in part, Medicare are funded by payroll taxes dedicated specifically to them. Some of the tax revenue pays for current benefits; anything that's left over goes into trust funds for the future. The programs were designed this way for political reasons.

On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.

In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy.

Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward.

What the investment community does like is short-term measures designed to boost share prices.

Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.

The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes.

The oil market is especially sensitive even to a hint of expansion or contraction in supply.

Although oil is a commodity, it's still not a commodity like coffee, which, thank God, we will have with us always. At some point the oil will run out.

Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.

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.

The problem with venality in business is that getting outraged about it makes it easy to miss the systemic problems that venality often disguises.

Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.

In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.

Instead of mindlessly tossing billions at or taking billions from the Net as such, investors should be spending their time making sure that it's the future Fords and General Motors of cyberspace that are getting the capital they need.

You can't fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.

What an economy really wants, after all, is not more investment per se but better investment. It wants capital to flow to companies that will create value - not in the form of a rising stock price but in the form of more goods for less cost, more jobs, and rising wages - by enhancing productivity.

In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.

The reason advertising is governed by fear, after all, is that most agencies rely on just a few clients to bring in the lion's share of their revenues.

If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong.