Сергей Кузнецов - Speak and Write like The Economist: Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

Lehman Brothers disaster would never have happened if it had been Lehman Sisters.

Walmart's 2.2m worldwide workforce is about the same size as China's army, excluding reservists.

We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shop, taught in the Pullman school, catechised in the Pullman church, and when we die we shall be buried in the Pullman cemetery and go to the Pullman hell.

The wealth distribution in the world is equivalent to a world of ten people, in which one has $1,000 and the other nine has $1 each.

John Maynard Keynes still best describes the challenge facing the discipline today: "Economics is the science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world."

Why didn't Sony invent the iPod?

The Busara Centre for Behavioural Economics in Nairobi, Kenya, runs experiments with participants from slums and rural areas. Its researchers looked at the results of a lottery-like scheme in rural Kenya, in which a random sample of 503 households spread over 120 villages was chosen to receive cash transfers of up to $1,525. The average transfer, $357, was almost enough to double the wealth of a typical villager. The researchers measured the well-being of villagers before and after the transfer, using a range of different methods: questionnaires about people's life satisfaction, screening for clinical depression and saliva tests for cortisol, a hormone associated with stress. There is an asymmetry in the way people compare themselves with others. We tend to look exclusively at those better off than us, rather than contemplate our position within the full range of outcomes. When the lot of others improves, we react negatively, but when our own lot improves, we shift our reference group to those who are still better off. In other words, we are never satisfied, since we quickly become accustomed to our own achievements. Perhaps that is what spurs people to earn more, and economies to grow.

The latest rally has been led by a small namber of stocks, sometimes dubbed the FAANGs (Facebook, Amason, Apple, Netflix and Google's parent, Alphabet) and sometimes FAAMG (replacing Netflix with Microsoft).

Should guests really expect authentic affection from staff whose weekly wage is less than their minibar bill?

Sometimes when you make a step forward you step in shit.

It is amazing how little $25m buys you these days.

Winston Churchill famously said America would always do the right thing after exhausting the alternatives.

If bullshit was currency, he would be a billionaire.

Slave ships could be smelled from miles away.

My watch costs more than your car… that's who I am.

Putting your man in charge is one thing, putting money on the table quite another.

Consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time.

Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black.

Rise early, work hard, strike oil.

They say that money can't buy happiness, but I would like to find out for myself if that's true.

Adam Smith spotted that economics has problems valuing nature. "Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it," he wrote.

"For a moderate fee," jokes Deirdre McCloskey, an economic historian, "an economist will tell you with all the confidence of a witch doctor that interest rates will rise 56 basis points next month or that dropping agricultural subsidies will increase Swiss national income by 14.8 %."

Haier and higher!

Britain had a window tax in the late 17th century, well before it introduced an income tax.

Pay the gas bill first, in other words, and then think of the world cruise.

The economic forces driving high-flying legal eagles into the bargain bin are no mystery.

The typical chief executive is more than six feet tall, has a deep voice, a good posture, a touch of grey in his thick, lustrous hair and, for his age, a fit body.

Running US Steel at the turn of the 20th century, Charles Schwab was perhaps the first person in America to earn a salary of $1m a year. What made him so successful? Was he a genius? No. Did he know more about steel than other people? Certainly not. So how did he get ahead? Schwab knew how "to make people like him".

At present the tallest is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which was completed in 2010 and, at 828 metres, shot past the previous record-holder, the 508-metre Taipei 101 tower. The Mecca Royal Clock Tower in Saudi Arabia, completed in 2012, is now, at 601 metres, the second-tallest. The Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan, built near the site of the World Trade Centre's twin towers (417 metres and 415 metres) that were destroyed by al-Qaeda in 2001, had its spire added in May to reach 541 metres. But work has now started on the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Its exact proposed height is still a secret, but it will be at least a kilometre.

Scratch the surface of the planet and the chances that hydrocarbons will spew forth appear to grow by the day. This week America's Energy Information Administration (EIA) released new estimates of the amount of gas in the world's shale beds. It reckons that there are 7,299 trillion cubic feet, 10 % more than its 2011 estimate. The EIA's estimates for shale oil, not included in the 2011 numbers, are a staggering 345 billion barrels, adding a tenth to the world's total oil resources.

You can happily go through a day consuming nothing but the products of family concerns: reading the New York Times (or the Daily Mail ), driving a BMW (or a Ford or a Fiat), making calls on your Samsung Galaxy, munching on Mars Bars and watching Fox on your Comcast cable.

He was a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks.

Koch Industries has also demonstrated a striking ability to reform itself. Prodded by the spate of legal suits in the late 1990s, the firm introduced a big safety programme. Charles's corporate mantra was "10,000 % compliance with all laws and regulations", by which he meant 100 % compliance from 100 % of employees.

Gold miners were supposed to be "believers" in gold rather than efficient managers out to maximise profits.

The best way to find Albany on a map is to look for the intersection of greed and ambition.

Simon Kuznets, a Nobel laureate, is supposed to have remarked: "There are four kinds of countries in the world: developed countries, undeveloped countries, Japan and Argentina."

The supply side sets the scene; the demand side provides the drama.

Facebook, Google and Groupon were all founded by people in their 20s or teens. Mark Zuckerberg, aged 27, will soon be able to count his years on earth in billions of dollars.

Relying on the import of money, workers and brains, America is a Ponzi scheme that works.

Managers who rely too much on their strengths may become hammers that see every problem as a nail.

Diamonds, famously, are a girl's best friend, graphite makes good pencil lead.

Walmart, the world's biggest retailer, has 1,500 employees in Silicon Valley trying to out-Amazon Amazon in areas such as logistics and making the most of social media.

Of the 7 billion people alive on the planet, 1.1 billion subsist below the internationally accepted extreme-poverty line of $1.25 a day. America's poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four.

When, as happened during the Napoleonic wars, a slaver's ship was captured by French privateers, the blacks aboard were often treated more carefully than the white seamen. The blacks were prized goods and their worth soared as commodity-based booms in the New World overwhelmed the sentiments of liberty, equality and fraternity. Once enslaved, the Africans were valuable as "investments (purchased and then rented out as labourers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities, and capital, making them an odd mix of abstract and concrete values."

Hundreds of jobs depend on Hollywood productions: blockbusters may require the help of as many as 1,000 firms. Producers need massages, assistants require stationery and starlets want scented candles and fresh roses; let alone what props managers, set-builders and costume departments will holler for.

Aluminium was once more costly than gold. Napoleon III, emperor of France, reserved cutlery made from it for his most favoured guests, and the Washington monument, in America's capital, was capped with it not because the builders were cheapskates but because they wanted to show.

The farthing was once made of silver, was steadily switched to cheaper copper, tin and bronze.

I am young and unemployed and face a lifetime on the dole. Why? This morning I collected my jobseekers allowance from my bank, where I have it paid directly into my account. I did not see a cashier, but withdrew money from a cash point. Then I went to the supermarket and bought French apples, German sausage and Danish bacon. I scanned the items at a self-service till, no need for a check-out assistant. I went home, switched on my Chinese computer and applied for jobs online. I do not send letters through the post; e-mail is more convenient. I then shopped online, I rarely use local shops. Who can I blame for the lack of jobs?

The original sin begins (depending on the chapter) in 1914, when the world suspended the gold standard at the start of the first world war; in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt devalued the dollar against gold; in 1971, when Richard Nixon ended the dollar's convertibility to gold under the Bretton Woods system; or in 1987, when Alan Greenspan cut interest rates after the stockmarket crash.

What is the single most important price in the world? Popular answers are the price of oil, American interest rates or the dollar. Yet Chinese wages are, arguably, more important. China has by far the world's biggest labour force, of around 800m – almost twice that of America, the European Union and Japan combined.

In 1820, as some historians reckon and Chinese commentators like to point out, China's GDP was one-third of the world total. Then the reversals of the century of humiliation brought it low. By the 1960s, China's GDP had dropped to just 4 % of the world total. Now it has recovered to about one-sixth of the world's GDP – and at least 90 % of America's – in purchasing-power parity terms, according to the Conference Board, a business research organisation. Nationalists eagerly await the day when China's economy becomes once more the biggest in the world by any measure.

The super-duper rich are surprisingly unimaginative when it comes to dreaming up new ways to outdo each other. It includes such essentials as a mini-submarine, a hair salon and two helipads. Owning a yacht with only one helipad would be embarrassing – a bit like owning a football club that is only fourth in England's Premier League.

Over 1.2 billion people have to defecate in the open. Surprisingly, some of those who have to defecate in the open do not mind. Some rural men, and even women, quite enjoy a social squat in the bushes. Slum-dwellers in Nairobi have to pick their way through streams of sewage and take care to avoid "flying toilets", plastic bags filled with excrement that are flung with desperate abandon into the night. Nearly two-fifths of the United States' 25,000 sewer systems illegally discharged raw sewage or other nasty stuff into rivers or lakes in 2007–09, and over 40 % of the country's waters are considered dangerously polluted. Contaminated water lays low almost 20m Americans a year.