There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for a few days and you’ll be thin for life.

To be sure, if you watch CNBC all day long you’ll pick up some interesting news about particular companies and the economy as a whole. Unfortunately, to get to the useful information, you have to wade through reams of useless stuff, with little guidance on how to distinguish between the two.

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.

It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It’s hard to prepare for the worst when you think you’re the best.

Since the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland wants to remain a part of Great Britain, and since Ireland itself has shown little interest in reunification, the IRA’s prospects for success through political channels have always been limited.

The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it’s been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them – blogs, say, or Wikipedia – can become influential.

Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It’s a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way – that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction – and still trust that they’re going to come up with good answers.

The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization’s benefits.

Being out of a job can erode people’s confidence and their sense of possibility; and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong.