People were fed up with reality shows about midgets getting married and weird Jerry Springer talk shows. There had been a real dry spell of intelligent family-oriented viewing: the type of program that Mom, Dad and the kids can all watch together. Wi...
The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin...
I grew up hearing stories about how my maternal grandfather had put himself through engineering school in New York City. He saved money by walking down to a gas station once a week to take a shower. When I applied to college, both education and inves...
It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technolo...
For me, it's just about keeping the standards up. We're a small country, so we have to punch above our weight. I'm not a great man for doing something just because it's Irish, and you never know what's going to work. But as long as we keep the standa...
The Internet rewards scale; by trading higher up-front costs for lower marginal cost, market leaders can invest in better technology and service. As a result, there is nothing online that is both great in quality and small in scale. Amazon wasn't ori...
Many financial advisors recommend that you diversify for your own protection. What they fail to tell you is that it is also for their protection. Since most financial advisors cannot tell you exactly which stock or mutual fund is a great investment, ...
It's a great story for us whenever an entrepreneur makes a crazy amount of money and we get to tell the world about it. For the entrepreneur? Not so much. Hitherto unknown relatives, entrepreneurs seeking angel investments, money managers and suppose...
I take more jobs when I need more money, if I'm investing in films. I take fewer when I don't. Or if something really good comes along, I usually find a way to do a good job on it in the time that I've got.
When you're doing a network show in the States, you're just a slave to the ratings. There's so much money invested that there's this pervasive atmosphere of fear and anxiety. Every morning after an episode of your show airs, everyone is fixated on th...
The idea of confidence, of the emotions of the population, is an incredibly important one in economics. John Maynard Keynes called it 'animal spirit.' And if people are feeling generally good about the future, they're more likely to spend money, to s...
A peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will likely depend to a great extent on the economic development of a future Palestinian state. As I have argued before, private sector investment - especially in the West Bank - is going to p...
Women who have it all should try having nothing: I have no husband, no children, no real estate, no stocks, no bonds, no investments, no 401(k), no CDs, no IRAs, no emergency fund - I don't even have a savings account. It's not that I have not planne...
The single most important thing we can do today to ensure a strong, successful future for Wisconsin is invest in our kids early - because what we do now will determine what kind of state Wisconsin will be 10, 20, even 50 years from now.
Despite global economic concerns, other nations are continuing to push forward and invest in their space capabilities. A U.S. withdrawal from the industry will only allow others to surge in their own capabilities, potentially impacting our national s...
You know, Greenwich Village was the traditional bohemia of New York. I wish I could say that was entirely true now. It's, uh... changed. It's now got, God help us, investment bankers and journalists, but it's still a very beautiful part of New York.
We're going to need to absorb some pain. The Republicans want to pile all the pain on people who can least afford it and the middle class and Democrats under his leadership want to make sure that we can address deficit reduction and continue to make ...
I think people ease into this careerist professionalism, so if you're a writer it's your job to manufacture books as opposed to writing them and to go to festivals and spend your life emotionally invested in reviews or the awards. You have to shrink ...
As a child, I was just never that interested in the lives of my favourite actors, like Cary Grant. I do wonder whether knowing too much about someone's personal life interrupts an audience's ability to suspend disbelief, to really invest in the chara...
Oil is a very valuable resource for life - electric heaters. We must have to transition ourselves to a post-oil era. And that's what we must discuss: searching and developing new sources of energy. And that requires scientific research. That requires...
One of the worst and most disheartening data points that I came across when doing research for 'The Wealth Cure' was that African-Americans passed on the least amount of cross-generational wealth of any distinct group. We don't save, we don't take ou...
