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

In the 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled that in America the opulent did not stand aloof from the people. A great cultural gap separates the elite from other Americans. They seldom watch "Oprah" or "Judge Judy" all the way through. In fact they do not watch much television at all. They eat in restaurants, but not often at Applebee's, Denny's or Waffle House, chains that cater to the common taste. They may take The Economist, with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and perhaps the New Yorker or Rolling Stone. They drink wine and boutique beers (and can discuss them expertly) but only in moderation, and they hardly ever smoke cigarettes.

Mr Icahn had expounded his theory of the moronisation of American management. The typical chief executive, he said, to chuckles, is "the guy you knew in college, the fraternity president – not too bright, back-slapping, but a survivor, politically astute, a nice guy". To be a chief executive, you need to know how not to tread on anyone's toes on the way up. You eventually become the number two, who "has got to be a little worse than the number one to survive". When the number two becomes chief executive, he promotes someone a little worse than him as his second-in-command. "It is the survival of the unfittest," concluded Mr Icahn. "Eventually we are all going to be run by morons."

Most students of taxation know the advice that Jean-Baptiste Colbert, treasurer to Louis XIV, offered the beleaguered taxman: pluck the goose so as to get the most feathers with the least hissing. But suppose the goose is housed on one farm, eats the birdseed scattered in a second, and lays its eggs in a third. Which farmer gets the plumage?

History offers perhaps only one true example of a reserve-currency shift, from the British pound to the dollar. The pound was king during the era of the gold standard. But in the years after 1914, Britain switched from net creditor to net debtor, and by the 1920s the dollar was the only currency convertible to gold (although the pound returned to gold in 1925). Two costly wars and two episodes of currency devaluation in Britain later, the dollar was unchallenged as the world's chief reserve currency.

Americans used to believe that their constitution protected private property. The Fifth Amendment allows the state to seize it only for "public use", and so long as "just compensation" is paid. "Public use" has traditionally been taken to mean something like a public highway. Roads would obviously be much harder to build if a single homeowner could hold out forever or for excessive compensation. The government's powers of "eminent domain" have also been used to clean up "blighted" slums. "Urban renewal", he noted, has sometimes been nicknamed "negro removal".