I'm all in favor of supporting fancy museums and elite schools, but face it: These aren't really charities as most people understand the term.
Detroit is really a model for how wealthier and whiter Americans escape the costs of public goods they'd otherwise share with poorer and darker Americans.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.
Walmart isn't your average mom-and-pop operation. It's the largest employer in America. As such, it's the trendsetter for millions of other employers of low-wage workers.
Remember, gold and silver always have had value and never have gone to zero. Can you say the same for stocks and bonds?
In the early 1980s, I burned my Social Security card at the New Orleans Investment Conference in protest of the state pension system.
The biggest culprits in the housing fiasco came from the private sector, and more specifically from a mortgage industry that was out of control.
They called me the sexiest economist in America, and that was years ago, when I had hair and body mass and my teeth were shiny.
All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.
Most philanthropists would still rather donate to elite schools, concert halls or religious groups than help the poor or sick.
With consumers having ever more choice, corporations must invest more and more in courting public opinion.
Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.
Terrorism and trade cannot be the only issues on which the world unites. We must commit ourselves to a global coalition to deal with exclusion, too.
We need to have much clearer regulations on things like corporate funding of scientific research. Things need to be made explicit which are implicit.
Consumers, unlike voters, expect an immediate response to their concerns; and companies, unlike governments, do not have the luxury of a mid-term lull.
I was really interested to see whether we could make predictions or forecasts by listening in on what people were saying on social media.
I was - the last protest I was at was in Genoa, where I got tear gassed, and I hate tear gas, and I hate being in crowds.
Colleges would compete by adding professors, enhancing programmes or building nicer facilities. So they competed by making institutions better.
I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become.
By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption.
We are awash in content that needs to be taught, yet the vast majority of colleges give a large portion of their faculties' salaries to fund research.
