The dramatic growth of the past half-century has led to higher living standards in much of the world, but has also resulted in urban sprawl, choking pollution and global warming.

What do you look for when you buy a pair of jeans? Color? Cut? Designer label? Price tag? One thing is certain: Even if you buy what you think is the same make/label/origin, year after year, it is an entirely different item with a brand-new geographic story.

What's the best way to convince a 40-year-old to stop smoking? Tell him that he'll get lung cancer and die? Not necessarily.

William Polk has an impressive resume as a historian, policy adviser and diplomat.

It's understandable that some economic forecasters, spooked by gloomy indicators, say the U.S. is heading into or already in a recession — but they may be overlooking key factors that buffer negative forces, according to Richard Kovacevich, chairman of Wells Fargo & Co.

Drive around the biggest cities in Arizona and you'll see an interesting contrast in land usage: packed-full swaths of retail, residential, business and industrial buildings bellied up to vast fields pockmarked with weeds and here and there, a house or two, or even a shiny new casino.

Maricopa County, Arizona is proposing to implement 53 measures to cut pollution from tiny particles (PM-10) that are small enough to be inhaled.

Consumers are worried, and that's a bad sign for the economy. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the economy; these days people appear reluctant to buy big-ticket items like cars and major appliances.

The new consumer sensibility, widely heralded in the business press, is the Experience Economy. Our world of mediated, staged and multi-sensory experience — an increasingly unreal world — gives rise to people desiring authentic or "real" experiences. But what is authenticity?

W. P. Carey professors Stephen Happel and Marianne Jennings are free-market defenders. For almost two decades they have evangelized the fundamentals of supply and demand, specifically in the secondary market for event tickets.