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

China makes things you can drop on your foot. America merely designs, brands and peddles them.

As Fred Hirsch argued in his 1977 book, "The Social Limits to Growth", many good things in life are "positional". You can enjoy them only if others don't. Sometimes, a quick car, fine suit or attractive house is not enough. One must have the fastest car, finest suit or priciest house.

Consumers cannot compare what is legally produced in California with what is legally produced in Colorado – to say nothing of what is illegally sold in New York's Washington Square Park.

Ekhart, Indiana, is the RV capital of the world.

Until recently, Carrefour's supermarkets in France were run along Napoleonic lines. Strict orders emanated from its headquarters in Paris. Every store sold a similar range of products. If selling groceries were like marching an army over the Alps, this strategy would have worked brilliantly. But it isn't, and it didn't. At the big Carrefour in Monacoout went the racks of cheap luggage, of the sort chic locals would be embarrassed to see their servants carrying.

Mr Abe promised that Japan would enter trade negotiations to join the American-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – though he offered no promise to eliminate tariffs of up to 777.7 % on rice.

Big pickups are seen in the car industry as a leading indicator: rising sales point to Americans starting to build kitchens, fix roofs and hire contractors.

Family history has large effects that persist for much greater spans of time. Fathers matter, but so do grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Indeed, it may take as long as 300–500 years for high- and low-status families to produce descendants with equal chances of being in various parts of the income spectrum.

Some 3m wrecks pepper the ocean floors, according to the UN (though few contain riches). Finding them involves lengthy research and lucky breaks. Recovery can take months of work by specialist crews. Of 52 annual reports filed by publicly listed shipwreck-recovery firms since 1996, only five show a net profit.

Acquisitions can also be a form of financial engineering. This was a favourite game of the conglomerates of the 1970s and 1980s. A company with highly rated shares would bid for a group with poorly rated equity. Say Acme has 100m shares, earnings of $10m (earnings per share of 10 cents) and a share price of $2 (a price-earnings ratio of 20). Grotco has the same earnings and number of shares but its share price is just $1 (a p/e of 10). If Acme makes an all-share bid valuing Grotco at $1.20, it will need to issue 60m new shares. The combined group will have $20m of earnings, 160m shares and earnings per share of 12.5 cents. With the help of nothing more than maths, Acme's earnings per share will have jumped by 25 %. Merger booms usually peak with the kind of deal that resembles a Las Vegas wedding after an alcohol-fuelled night: both parties regret it in the morning.

Chairman Mao, as ever, had said it best: imagine the ping-pong ball as the head of your capitalist opponent, and each shot a point for the motherland.

Overall, the number without homes in the US is staggering. The number of homeless veterans of the Vietnam war is greater than the number who died in it. On any given night in America more than 640,000 men, women and children are forced to seek shelter, live in their cars, or sleep on the streets. Last year nearly 1.6m people used an emergency shelter.

A Polish Jew in an Episcopal graveyard in a largely Dominican neighbourhood. What could be more New York?

Obama sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.

The average Swiss watch costs $685. A Chinese one costs around $2 and tells the time just as well (see chart). So how on earth, a Martian might ask, can the Swiss watch industry survive? Yet it does. Few can match the precision of a Nivarox ("Nicht variabel oxydfest" (G.) or "Non-Variable Non-Oxidizing") balance spring.

The euro needs French reform, German extravagance and Italian political maturity.

In happier days before the euro crisis, one government in Lisbon rebranded the Algarve as the Allgarve, hoping to appeal to English-speaking tourists. Now a Portuguese wit suggests rebranding the whole country as Poortugal.

The cult of the insider in Japan is rooted in its paddy fields, some scholars argue. To cultivate wet rice, villagers need to work together, sharing land, labour, water and gossip. Anyone not in the group is out of the loop. There is something of the rice paddy about Japan's capital markets, too.

"LVMH is like a mini Germany," boasts an insider. Like that country's Mittelstand, it has built a reputation for craftsmanship and quality that people are happy to pay extra for. The difference is, the Mittelstand makes unsexy things such as machine tools and shaving brushes, whereas LVMH makes champagne, handbags and other objects of desire.

The 1912 games were the last one where gold medals were made entirely of gold. Now they consist mainly of silver with a thin coat of gold. Winners in London are advised not to bite too hard on their medals, as they will have a gold content of only about 1.5 %.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that: "In every big transaction, there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make the moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on." Like so many novelists, he was talking bosh. No alert lawyer takes only "a little".

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton, a prolific bank robber (pictured, after he retired), is said to have replied: "Because that's where the money is." Sutton reportedly pinched $2m during a lifetime of crime.

The phenomenon has been described as the Wimbledon effect: Britain provides the beautiful arena where foreign champions come and beat the hell out of British players. The annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race is much the same: a slugfest between predominantly non-British mercenaries.

The real money is where the pain is.

The human animal is a beast that must die. If he's got money, he buys and buys and buys everything he can, in the crazy hope one of those thing.

"Corruption is rampant at high levels, and at low levels," said an FBI agent, before adding: "and all levels in between".

Foreign remittances continue to grow. In all, 250m migrant workers will send home $500 billion this year – up from $410 billion in 2012. At their destination savings often end up under the mattress – rather than channelled into microfinance schemes, for instance, as many development experts have long hoped. The marriage between remittances and microfinance has not happened yet.

"Republican gluttons of privilege" who had "stuck a pitchfork in the farmer's back".

He spent his entire career within the DeBeers stable.

It takes pride in sticking to its companies through thick and thin.

The distinction between being a successful tycoon and being an enemy of the people has been blurred.

Marriott likes to buy to the sound of cannons and sell to the sound of violins.

40 % of Missourians would oppose a new tax even if it was being used "to construct the landing pad for the second coming of Christ".

Once upon a time the overstressed executive bellowing orders into a telephone, cancelling meetings, staying late at the office and dying of a heart attack was a stereotype of modernity. Cardiac arrest – and, indeed, early death from any cause – is the prerogative of underlings. The best medicine, then, is promotion. Prosper, and live long.

Narcissism index indicators of CEO: prominence of the boss's photo in the annual report, company press releases. Length of his Who is Who entry, frequency of his use of the first singular interviews, ratios of cash compensation to second-highest paid exec.