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financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”

s people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers - what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.

nce that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment - what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment” - would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.

Yet throughout this period, the financial system - not the economy, but finance as an industry - was growing by leaps and bounds

Nor did they pay attention to consumers’ and companies’ growing dependence on debt, and the growing use of leverage within the financial system.

By the end of the 20th century, the financial system that Minsky had warned about had materialized, complete with speculative borrowers, Ponzi borrowers, and precious few of the conservative borrowers who were the bedrock of a truly stable economy. Over decades, we really had forgotten the meaning of risk. When storied financial firms started to fall, sending shockwaves through the “real” economy, his predictions started to look a lot like a road map.

But does Minsky’s work offer us any practical help? If capitalism is inherently self-destructive and unstable - never mind that it produces inequality and unemployment, as Keynes had observed - now what?

Minsky’s other solution, however, was considerably more radical and less palatable politically. The preferred mainstream tactic for pulling the economy out of a crisis was - and is - based on the Keynesian notion of “priming the pump” by sending money that will employ lots of high-skilled, unionized labor - by building a new high-speed train line, for example.

Minsky, however, argued for a “bubble-up” approach, sending money to the poor and unskilled first. The government - or what he liked to call “Big Government” - should become the “employer of last resort,” he said, offering a job to anyone who wanted one at a set minimum wage. It would be paid to workers who would supply child care, clean streets, and provide services that would give taxpayers a visible return on their dollars. In being available to everyone, it would be even more ambitious than the New Deal, sharply reducing the welfare rolls by guaranteeing a job for anyone who was able to work. Such a program would not only help the poor and unskilled, he believed, but would put a floor beneath everyone else’s wages too, preventing salaries of more skilled workers from falling too precipitously, and sending benefits up the socioeconomic ladder.

But not perfect. Indeed, if there’s anything to be drawn from Minsky’s collected work, it’s that perfection, like stability and equilibrium, are mirages.

His was a kind of existential economics: capitalism, like life itself, is difficult, even tragic. “There is no simple answer to the problems of our capitalism,” wrote Minsky. “There is no solution that can be transformed into a catchy phrase and carried on banners.”

nd he advises against listing items from least to most expensive, because that focuses the consumer on pric

stead he mixes up items, making it hard to find their price — thereby encouraging the customer to emotionally commit to something before finding out what it cost

But my favorite strategy of his is that of putting some absurdly expensive item on the menu. Rapp doesn’t expect many consumers to buy it, but having it there makes expensive items appear cheap by compariso

his explains why having high MSRPs is so important. Conventional wisdom is that high list prices allow sales organizations to engage in price discrimination through discounting. There’s definitely some truth to this assumption, but there’s more to it than that. High list prices can actually increase perceived value — even in businesses in which the marginal cost of production is low.

At times like this, with people I love, the no just felt empty and a little incomplete. At the stoplight, she leaned over and spoke: "I think I want to be left out of this little experiment."

A rule that applies to the time it takes to get a job done (work will grow to fill the available time) or to electricity (demand grows to match the available supply), also applies to social power. As more becomes available, our lives increasingly fill with moments necessitating its use.

n Western culture, the physical traits of influence and power manifest themselves in Hollywood, in the news, and in history. Broad shoulders, straight white teeth, tanned skin, thinness — these are a few of the traditional characteristics of people who could be considered “successful” — not tattoos and body piercings, though both are more accepted now than they were in the 1950s

n other words, we’ve developed a way of thinking about the world that predictably associates style, income, and success. Unfortunately, that association is becoming less and less accurate as more global cultures begin to interact and merge.

The fact is, these types of studies reduce the complexities of culture to sweeping generalizations — generalizations that are emphasized further in news stories, blog posts, and tweets.

“The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It’s to make meaning,”

his new cultural climate presents a historic opportunity for brands to transform themselves into arbiters of meaning. When your brand is a vector, your base becomes a movement — as we learned from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. A “meaning surplus” will become imperative: Only businesses that give more than they take will be able to create sustained brand loyalty. Out: bottom-line pragmatists and financial wizards. In: philosophers, ethicists, and social entrepreneurs.

The advent of the social web has disrupted traditional marketing conventions and has democratized the concept of branding

The truth is, a brand is no longer exclusively the bastion of marketing. In today’s open-sourced, hyper-transparent economy, customers own the brand, and no platform, book, or rigid compliance guidelines designed to protect marketers’ idea of that brand can change this. You cannot control your brand anymore, period.

A brand is a small town that never sleeps. It is open to (almost) everyone, it is vibrant, and it is made of and by people who are willing to connect in pursuit of either utilitarian value or a common cause — or both. It is composed of myriad social networks, micro-communities that communicate 24/7. Companies that embrace this new continuum and act as “brand urbanites” will easily adapt to the new digital arena

. If brands don’t have a point of view, they won’t be able to connect. If they don’t have an argument to make, they won’t be meaningful.

Brands need to be well-traveled, well-read, and educated. If they only repeat the same message again and again, they won’t be able to engage in a conversation.

efined marketing as “the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.” Put another way, every single interaction the customer has with a business can and should be seen as marketing.

“A truly successful business is one that is an ongoing conversation. Those conversations are marketing — if you add value and connect to your customer, you’re succeeding. If you don’t, you fail.”

Clustering customers into segments based on aggregated demographic or behavioral data has serious limitations in an “age of conversations” in which the boundaries between consumer and producer, amateur and professional, are blurring.

empathy as a critical skill set and calls for companies to be “wired to care.”

The more control it gives up, the more influence it gains.

The more invisible marketing becomes, the more effective it will be.

“Brands aren’t defined by campaigns anymore, but by the consumer ecosystems we nurture to support them,”

“Start with beliefs and you’ll get believers. Marketers still need to use every trick in the book and dozens that haven’t been thought of yet to engage people in great, compelling stories. The difference today is this: To make believers, the stories have to be true.”

Increasingly, this content is small. Small content can go anywhere. With accelerated news cycles, shrinking attention spans, and communications fragmented into 140-character tweets, instant gratification and presence have become the predominant paradigms of online interaction

Microblogging services such as Twitter diversify meaning into myriad atoms of communication, hyper-targeted in-the-moment forms of looking at the world by expressing it in real time: As marketing strategist Geoff Livingston says, “Now is gone.” The shorter the attention span, the more important the role of microformats. The more sliced up the content, the richer the channels of communication. The smaller your brand, the more you can share it.

The Obama for America campaign masterfully utilized the power of social networks to generate this small-world effect. “As networks grow, they shrink,” says Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University. “As people accumulate friends, the distances shrink.” The more people joined the social Web hubs of the Obama campaign, the easier it became for the messages to spread and for the campaign to amplify its outreach and turn undecided voters into Obama voters and passive supporters into active volunteers. The bigger the network grew, the more the distance between the brand and its followers shrank. The campaign became an inclusive movement for everyone: Obama was us, and we were Obama.

Similarly, all businesses — regardless of their industry — need to realize that they’re not just selling products or services: They’re in the communication business, tasked with sharing information.

In a digital economy where most transactions are free (or expected to be free), value is created through sharing. Sharing makes content meaningful.

A study from Nokia predicts that by 2012 a quarter of all entertainment will be “circular”: created, edited, and shared within peer groups rather than generated by traditional media.

. Similarly, management guru Gary Hamel (The Future of Management) proclaims a new “gift economy”: “Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it. To gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content.

And you must do it quickly; if you don’t, someone else will beat you to the punch — and garner the credit that might have been yours.”

Companies that are not afraid of showing their vulnerability have begun to embrace radical transparency as an effective way to humanize their brands: Online retailer Zappos lets every employee blog, Comcast has its engineers go on message boards to answer customer questions, and more and more companies are using Twitter for what it is best suited for — ostentatiously public personal conversations.

As much as transparency can underscore that you have nothing to hide, it can also highlight that you have a lot to give

sunny yellow

warm coral, vermillion orange, verdant green, hibiscus red, hot pink, pungent purple and sapphire blue

sugary pink, lavender, fuchsia, turquoise, lemony yellow, and (of course) the signature Valentino red.

Burberry Prorsum

neutral palette

magenta

bright turquoise

draping of fabrics into pleated, airy dresses in cobalt, emerald, yellow and orange

After a pause for a sampling of black and white, the explosion of color continued with teal, magenta, citron, coral, and purple billowing, belted, embroidered and embellished silky creations.

How to Color Your Wardrobe

one bright piece as an accent feature

contrasts bright colors of spring and summer nicely

innocence and purity.

White can expose you to fashion faux pas, however, since lightweight fabrics in this color easily reveal visible panty lines and/or colors and patterns of underwear

his legendary status may be in part due to the fact that black makes people look thinner

Black absorbs light and is hands-down the most stylish and timeless color in the world of fashion

Dramatic black is often worn by creative types, and in our commercial society black is the color of authority and power

passion and love,

emotionally intense color

produces a biological response, getting people all hot and bothered by quickening the pulse and increasing the breathing rate.

also makes the wearer look heavier and is an appetite stimulant

Red can also appear confrontational – think of matadors – so avoid red when carrying out negotiations, as it may work against you.

very gentle and calming

Purple is a color rarely found in nature – a fact that instantly draws attention to anyone wearing it

traditionally represented luxury, royalty, wealth and sophistication

Blue usually produces the opposite emotional response of the color red; blue stimulates a chemical reaction in the body, producing feelings of peace and tranquility, so blue is the perfect shade for yoga apparel.

Fashion consultants advise wearing blue to job interviews because it has been shown to symbolize loyalty.

alming and refreshing color, green represents nature.

he color of money, dark green is masculine, and suggests wealth.

he most difficult color for the eye to process, yellow can be overpowering – perhaps this is why people tend to lose their tempers and babies cry more in yellow rooms.

The Color Orange

Wearing orange is a fantastic way to command attention. A combination of passionate red and happy yellow,

Like red, orange is very stimulating, but orange (and especially peachy orange) is less aggressive and more soothing.

brain's "reward system

pleasure -- and addiction.

still be intensely in love after two decades of marriage

honeymoon feeling can last

other areas lit up, too

oxytocin

secreted by both sexes during orgasm

onogamy and long-term attachment

dopamine plays a big role in the excitement of love, and oxytocin is key for the calmer experience of attachment.

A housewife should run her household the way an executive runs his business: with goals, schedules, and plans. She should make dinner—or at least do all the shopping and planning for it—right after breakfast, so that she isn't running around like a madwoman in the late afternoon with no idea what to cook. She should take time to rest and relax during the day so that she is not exhausted and depleted come whoopee hour. With the right kind of planning, "you can have all your home duties finished before noon." In a household run by an incompetent wife, however, "by the time her husband enters the scene, she's had it," Morgan writes. "She's too tired to be available to him."

his seems a fairly accurate depiction of many contemporary two-career marriages, in which dinner is a nightly crisis (what to eat?) and an endless negotiation (who to cook it?) entered into by two people who have been managing crises and negotiating agreements all day long and who still have the children's homework and baths and bedtimes to contend with.

The book advises the housewife to prepare for her husband's arrival at the end of the day: to have dinner ready, to minimize household noise and clutter, to avoid assaulting her man with a list of domestic problems and disappointments, and to inquire about his day. There was a sense back in those innocent years that a day at the office was a tiring event that required a bit of recuperation: a cold drink, a sympathetic companion, a decent meal—all of which, I suspect, functioned as a sexual tonic

No one has spent even a moment planning a gentle re-entry into home life, let alone plotting a thrilling seduction.

To many contemporary women, however, the notion that sex might have any function other than personal fulfillment (and the occasional bit of carefully scheduled baby making) is a violation of the very tenets of the sexual revolution that so deeply shaped their attitudes on such matters. Under these conditions, pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day's end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids' dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.

For many couples child-rearing has become not merely one aspect of marriage but its entire purpose and function.

Spouses regard each other not as principally lovers and companions but as sharers of the great, unending burden of taking care of the children. And make no mistake about it: American middle-class families have made child-rearing a dauntingly complex enterprise. My children are still very small, but it has been made abundantly clear to me by friends and acquaintances that I had better get in the market for an SUV or a minivan, because I am soon enough going to be shuttling the children and their friends to a bewildering series of soccer games, soccer parties, soccer tournaments. Already I throw birthday parties with guest lists and budgets that approximate those of a wedding-rehearsal dinner.

The curious thing about this labor-intensive variety of parenting is that it has arisen now, when parents—and specifically mothers—have less time to devote to their children than ever before

One can't help finding in these developments a frantic attempt at compensation for the hours some professional-class mothers spend away from their children.

Mothering, which used to be a rather private affair (requiring, principally, a playpen, a back yard, a television set, and a coffeepot), has now adopted a very public dimension. Why, of course Sarah So-and-So is a good mother: little Andrew is at Gymboree, Music Rhapsody, Bright Child, and Fit for Kids every week! All of domestic life now turns on the entertainment and happiness not of the adults but of the children. At vacation time my husband and I don't drag our little boys through the Louvre, as I was dragged at a tender age (because my parents wanted to see it, and it would never have occurred to them to consult their children about where to go on holiday). Rather, we check into hotels with elaborate children's pools and nightly fireworks and huge duck ponds.

Nowadays, American parents of a certain social class seem squeaky clean, high-achieving, flush with cash, relatively exhausted, obsessed with their children, and somehow—how to pinpoint this?—undersexed.

If I Don't Know How She Does It, a book about a working woman who discovers deep joy and great sex by quitting her job and devoting herself to family life, had been written by a man, he would be the target of a lynch mob the proportions and fury of which would make Salman Rushdie feel like a lucky, lucky man

He pressed up against me in dark alleys. I gave him blow jobs as he drove on one of our weekend treks. We made out in taxicabs.

There was a kind of volatile tension wired through our relationship that set my body on fire feeling his arm resting against mine in the dark cavern of a movie theater.

hat they don't understand, and what women of an earlier era might have been able to tell them, is that when the little faucet turns off, it is time not to rat out your husband (is there anything more wounding to a man, and therefore more cruel and vicious, than a wife's public admission that he is not satisfying her in bed?) but rather to turn it back on. It is not complicated; it requires putting the children to bed at a decent hour and adopting a good attitude. The rare and enviable woman is not the one liberated enough to tell hurtful secrets about her marriage to her girlfriends or the reading public. Nor is she the one capable of attracting the sexual attentions of a variety of worthy suitors. The rare woman—the good wife, and the happy one—is the woman who maintains her husband's sexual interest and who returns it in full measure.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

We all remember the promises. The slogans. They were all about freedom, liberation. Supposedly we were in handcuffs and wanted out of them. The key that dangled in front of us was a microchip.

Let's not speculate on the motives that (mostly male) evolutionary psychologists might have in asserting that their wives are programmed to not really care if they sleep around, and turn instead to the evidence. In questionnaires, more men than women say they'd be upset more by sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, by a margin of more than 2-to-1, David Buss of the University of Texas found in an early study of American college students. But men are evenly split on which kind of infidelity upsets them more: half find it more upsetting to think of their mate falling in love with someone else; half find it more upsetting to think of her sleeping with someone else. Not very strong evidence for the claim that men, as a species, care more about sexual infidelity. And in some countries, notably Germany and the Netherlands, the percentage of men who say they find sexual infidelity more upsetting than the emotional kind is only 28 percent and 23 percent. Which suggests that, once again, it depends: in cultures with a relaxed view of female sexuality, men do not get all that upset if a woman has a brief, meaningless fling. It does not portend that she will leave him. It is much more likely that both men and women are wired to detect behavior that threatens their bond, but what that behavior is depends on culture. In a society where an illicit affair portends the end of a relationship, men should indeed be wired to care about that. In a society where that's no big deal, they shouldn't—and, it seems, don't. New data on what triggers jealousy in women also undercut the simplistic evo-psych story. Asked which upsets them more—imagining their partner having acrobatic sex with another woman or falling in love with her—only 13 percent of U.S. women, 12 percent of Dutch women and 8 percent of German women chose door No. 2. So much for the handy "she's wired to not really care if I sleep around" excuse.

epend on? The very phrase is anathema to the dogma of a universal human nature. But it is the essence of an emerging, competing field. Called behavioral ecology, it starts from the premise that social and environmental forces select for various behaviors that optimize people's fitness in a given environment. Different environment, different behaviors—and different human "natures." That's why men prefer Ms. 36-25-36 in some cultures (where women are, to exaggerate only a bit, decorative objects) but not others (where women bring home salaries or food they've gathered in the jungle).

nd it's why the evo psych tenet that men have an inherited mental module that causes them to prefer young, beautiful women while women have one that causes them to prefer older, wealthy men also falls apart. As 21st-century Western women achieve professional success and gain financial independence, their mate preference changes, scientists led by Fhionna Moore at Scotland's University of St Andrews reported in 2006 in the journal Evolutionand Human Behaviour. The more financially independent a woman is, the more likely she is to choose a partner based on looks than bank balance—kind of like (some) men. (Yes, growing sexual equality in the economic realm means that women, too, are free to choose partners based on how hot they are, as the cougar phenomenon suggests.) Although that finding undercuts evo psych, it supports the "it depends" school of behavioral ecology, which holds that natural selection chose general intelligence and flexibility, not mental modules preprogrammed with preferences and behaviors. "Evolutionary psychology ridicules the notion that the brain could have evolved to be an all-purpose fitness-maximizing mechanism," says Hill. "But that's exactly what we keep finding."