Economics is all about consumption. People either spend money now or they use financial instruments - like bonds, stocks and savings accounts - so they can spend more later.
The cardinal rule of taxation is that whatever you put a levy on, you'll inevitably get less of. Taxing corporate activity means less investing, less hiring, fewer jobs and a smaller economy, which hurts the rich, the poor and the middle class alike.
In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.
To put it simply and a bit crudely: Our economy is demanding more well-educated workers than our schools are providing. To attract this scarce resource, communities have to offer more than just jobs.
I'm not the first to admit that raising a child in Park Slope, Brooklyn, can bear an embarrassing resemblance to the TV show 'Portlandia.' My wife and I try to have some ironic distance from the culture of organic, chemical-free parenting, but we're often participants.
If large numbers of people believe they have no shot at a better life in the future, they will work less hard and generate fewer new ideas and businesses. The economy, as a whole, will be poorer.
Whenever you hear news about jobless claims or the unemployment rate, you should translate that in your mind to one simple phrase: Stay in school.
What we want as an economy is companies and people, you know, working hard to come up with creative ways to be more productive. We don't want companies and people working hard to lobby government for special tax cuts.
The Internet is, among other things, a massive, chaotic marketplace. Too much information, it turns out, is a lot like no information.
The world I want to live in is a world where everybody is a bit more uncertain about their arguments and is a bit more open to other people's arguments. I think that we can engage ideas without ad hominem attacks.
Perhaps concentrated wealth will inspire a nation of innovative problem-solvers. But if the view of many economists is right - that it sometimes discourages innovation - then we should worry.
A rule of thumb: If the company you work for provides a product or service that's pretty much the same as what was offered last year and a few years before that, it might be time to start looking for something new.
We tend in this country to talk about Democrats and Republicans, and think there's little group over there called Independents that's maybe 2%. That is not the case, and it has not been the case for most of modern American history.
Happiness quantification sounds a bit wishy-washy, sure, and through a series of carefully administered surveys across the globe, economists and psychologists have certainly confronted a fair number of sticky issues around how to measure, and even define, happiness.
Happiness statistics may be most valuable in smaller, local discussions. Understanding how different sorts of programs affect the well-being of citizens would be enormously helpful to a mayor choosing between building a new bridge or offering a tax cut.
Most rich countries have reported increases in happiness as they become richer.
Much of what we consider the American way of life is rooted in the period of remarkably broad, shared economic growth, from around 1900 to about 1978.
The so-called skills gap is really a gap in education, and that affects all of us.
One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.
We can fight over what the taxation levels should be, but the tax system should be very, very simple and not distortionary.
