Anyone wondering about the long term future of the US economy should take a look at the chart below. It shows the unrelenting growth of services’ share of American GDP growing from 25% to 45% over the last sixty years. Far and away the fastest growth area has been in health care, and with the [...]

Anyone who believes that housing is on the rebound, and that now is the time to buy, should take a very hard look at the numbers I dredged up for my spring lecture and luncheon tour. There are 140 million personal residences in the US. Today, there are 19 million homes either directly or indirectly [...]

“The art of taxation consists of so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the smallest amount of hissing,” said Jean-Baptist Colbert, a 17th century French minister of Finance.

The success of the recent oil auctions in Iraq is creating a windfall for American oil services companies. Schlumberger (SLB), Baker Hughes (BHI), Weatherford (WFT), and Halliburton (HAL) have committed to drilling 2,500-3,000 new wells per year and building new pipeline and shipping terminal infrastructure that could make the country the world’s largest oil exporter. [...]

I spent the weekend attending a graduation in Washington state, a stone’s throw from where the 2010 Winter Olympics were held last year. While sitting through the tedious reading of 550 names, and listening to the wailing bagpipes, I did several calculations on the back of the commencement program. I came to some startling conclusions. [...]

I spent an evening with the New Yorker Magazine columnist, Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, and probably the most prolific publisher of original, consensus challenging ideas today. Half English and half Jamaican, the preeminent challenger of clichés and stereotypes was himself a cliché and a stereotype, wearing the standard issue [...]