Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing t...
One of the things that concerns me is the lack of adult supervision, and more specifically, caring adult supervision, at various reform schools and juvenile detention centers. I think there's a kind of Darwinian brutality that can run rampant when ki...
An author entices the readers with their words, and it is painful for them to even lose a sentence. But films and books are two different mediums and should be dealt differently. What works in a book might not work for a film. When I saw 'Anna Kareni...
I remember how a man once got in touch with me to tell me that he was so engrossed in my book that he had to take a day off from work just so that he could finish reading it. Such kind of responses from my readers is extremely endearing, and it keeps...
Like its agriculture, Africa's markets are highly under-capitalized and inefficient. We know from our work around the continent that transaction costs of reaching the market, and the risks of transacting in rural, agriculture markets, are extremely h...
During the summers, when I'm in Maine, I work at a desk that's located beyond all tendrilly wi-fi reaches. It takes me a few days to break the constant e-mail-checking habit, then I find I don't want to check my e-mail ever, and often don't for days.
When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have t...
I've written books as acts of discovery: things I need to know and that I need to touch. And it's very dangerous work to deal with the most toxic internal elements... I feel like Madame Curie at my computer. I feel like I should be hemorrhaging from ...
There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is ab...
The fundamental flaw in Social Security and Medicare is that they violate the 'welfare principle' in economics. The welfare principle forms the fundamental basis of all charitable work in churches and other private organizations: assist those who nee...
I'm as much my own master as anyone can be, without being the master of others. I can write anywhere - all I need is a couple of hours of solitude and a computer, and I can write a chapter. Since my work is portable, I can live anywhere I like.
Mother Earth needs us to keep our covenant. We will do this in courts, we will do this on our radio station, and we will commit to our descendants to work hard to protect this land and water for them. Whether you have feet, wings, fins, or roots, we ...
The landscape of the mind, against which our thoughts and expectations move, when the wind of the imagination is active, changes as quickly as the clouds; and indeed it consists often of several landscapes, semi-transparent and showing through one an...
The economics we need is of the "seminar room" variety, not the "rule-of-thumb" kind. It is an economics that recognizes its limitations and caveats and knows that the right message depends on the context. The fine print is what economists have to co...
If economics were only about profit maximization, it would be just another name for business administration. It is a social discipline, and society has other means of cost accounting besides market prices.
Without an informed electorate, politicians will continue to use the bottom billion merely for photo opportunities, rather than promoting real transformation.
Th direct elimination of elimination of poverty should be the objective of all development aid. Development should be viewed as a human rights issue, not as a question of simply increasing the gross national product (GNP).
I believe that the emphasis on curbing population growth diverts attention from the more vital issue of pursuing policies that allow the population to take care of itself.
In an age where everything and everyone is linked through networks of glass and air, no one - no business, organization, government agency, country - is an island. We need to do right by all our stakeholders, and that's how you create value for share...
Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and town...
In 1977, when I started my first job at the Federal Reserve Board as a staff economist in the Division of International Finance, it was an article of faith in central banking that secrecy about monetary policy decisions was the best policy: Central b...
