The only sustainable way to build a business these days, we are told, is to be straight with your customers. Today's sophisticated consumers, armed with...

(See Justin’s previous posts from Davos here, here, and here.) So you write an article about how capitalism needs to be rethought along principles of what you call “shared value,” a prominent business publication puts it on its cover, and then you show up at perhaps the world’s foremost gathering of capitalists to find everyone […]

The “one and only social responsibility of business,” economist Milton Friedman wrote back in 1970 in a New York Times Magazine essay that launched a thousand arguments, is “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game …” Friedman contrasted […]

Inversions are just the tip of the iceberg.

Baruch Lev teaches accounting and finance at NYU's Stern School of Business. He's a man of strong opinions, generally backed up by lots and lots of research....

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson ran into an online buzzsaw this week. He says the “liberal blogosphere” was out to do him in, and that was part of it. But there’s something bigger at work: a groundswell of resentment for and frustration with the “thought leaders” who craft our conventional wisdom, get paid big speaking fees […]

In his wonderful book Expert Political Judgment, psychologist Philip Tetlock (following the lead of Isaiah Berlin), divided the world of political forecasters into hedgehogs and foxes: The intellectually aggressive hedgehogs knew one big thing and sought, under the banner of parsimony, to expand the explanatory power of that big thing to “cover” new cases; the […]

Economic difficulties can be the fruits of success.

Why Romney or Obama might deliver the opposite policies from what you’d expect.

Sometimes cable companies' poor service is a strategic choice.

Historian Walter Friedman on the pioneers of forecasting, and why we haven't gotten better at it.

He didn’t buy in expecting a 20% annual return on his investment. And that’s progress, of a sort.