Amity Shlaes

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

The result of the collaborative culture is that corporations or government institutions focus intensely on internal culture and pour their energy into achieving minuscule policy changes relating to workplace efficiency, gender or race.

When you see government leaders really bullying business, you know that government's economic policy is failing. They get angry and they get desperate.

To investors, job creation is a second-order effect. Market participants care first about interest rates, exchange rates, bond prices and the one great factor that affects all three: the long-term solvency of a bond company called the U.S. government.

McCain likes strong defense, and he's viscerally suspicious of big companies. So he's more a Square Deal guy than a New Deal guy.

People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.

I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.

Although unions may be good for a worker, singular, they are not always good for workers, plural. Especially when it comes to finding a job.

Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

Many writers, including myself, have detailed how irresponsible government actions slow economic recoveries. Similar behavior by individuals impedes growth, too. If you can't find someone reliable to do a deal with, you simply don't do the deal at all.

What's wrong with the auto industry isn't that it failed to create jobs. What's wrong is that it emphasizes jobs over general growth itself.

I'm always for lower taxes because lower taxes make people want to do things. Less burden, more fun, and economics is about people wanting to have fun. Growth is fun for people in the marketplace.