Spend much time with economists around this time of year, and you will, eventually, get around to hearing about the dreadful inefficiency of exchanging gifts. You desperately wrack your brains for something, and then buy a supply of scented bath oil for someone who has only got a shower; they return the favor by giving you three books you …

  Plenty of M&A deals have destroyed value for the acquirer’s investors but few have done so quite as quickly, or egregiously, as Westinghouse Electric’s purchase of CB&I Stone & Webster Inc., a U.S. nuclear construction business. On Tuesday, Westinghouse’s parent company Toshiba Corp. said a reassessment of the $229 million deal, announced barely a year ago, might oblige it …

  The notion that we’re getting worse at generating big, world-changing ideas has been gaining currency. As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip wrote earlier this month: Outside of personal technology, improvements in everyday life have been incremental, not revolutionary. Houses, appliances and cars look much like they did a generation ago. Airplanes fly no faster than in the 1960s. …