In an era of CEO pay gone wild, Jim Sinegal is the steal of the century. The co-founder and chief executive of Costco earns a salary of just $350,000 , richly refuting the boardroom notion that CEOs of billion-dollar corporations require pay packets to match. Costco is one of the U.S.'s largest companies, with 118,800 workers, 473 warehouse-club stores and sales of $51.9 billion in its most recent fiscal year. Costco's stock has trounced archrival Wal-Mart's in recent years. Perhaps ...

Have you seen a shift in the past 20 years in the public's attitude toward service? I think so. I hope so. Many schools include a service project as part of their curriculum, and many corporations have in-house projects for their employees or give them time off to do volunteer work. There's a greater understanding about the importance of giving back. Presidents Carter, Clinton and Bush recently feted you for making volunteerism important. What was that like? First, it was a lot of fun to ...

Ana Idolo may be too young to order her own food, but the 2-year-old knows what she wants. As her father Marco unpacks the Happy Meal he ordered for her at a Barcelona McDonald's, she ignores the chicken nuggets and French fries, and instead holds out her hand in eager anticipation for the best part of the meal: a small plastic statue of the Star Wars character Yoda. "Sometimes I think we just buy these for the toys," says ...

Imagine if the Empire State Building were to be placed smack in the middle of Venice or Jerusalem. Jutting out from the ancient streets, a skyscraper of that size would seem absurdly out of sync with the iconic beauty of the cities. Developers would likely never get such a proposal approved. But in Russia the rules are different. Last month, officials in St. Petersburg approved the construction of a 400-meter-tall skyscraper in the historic center of the city. The city's beautiful Baroque and neoclassical ...

For a nation whose citizens pride themselves on self-reliance, the U.S. doles out an awful lot of welfare. Corporations get it. Farmers get it. Even poor people get it. But no other interest group makes out quite the way homeowners do. They — or we, I should say, for I'm a homeowner too — are at the receiving end of a truly staggering array of subsidies and tax breaks. Putting an exact price tag on all of them is ...