James Surowiecki Quotes
Top 65 wise famous quotes and sayings by James Surowiecki
James Surowiecki Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from James Surowiecki on Wise Famous Quotes.
The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes.
If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.
Besides great climates and lovely beaches, California and Greece share a fondness for dysfunctional politics and feckless budgeting.
Pop music thrives on repetition. You know a song's a hit when you've heard it so often that you'll be happy never to hear it again.
I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we're being exceptionally efficient.
The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.
The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let's try importing some human capital instead.
The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.
Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.
On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.
The problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds.
Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.
Art collecting has traditionally been the domain of wealthy individuals in search of rewards beyond the purely financial.
A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are.
Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.
The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they've been politically repressive.
Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.
All things being equal, letting people make decisions for themselves will produce smarter outcomes, collectively, than relying on government planners.
The desire for reinvention seems to arise most often when companies hear the siren call of synergy and start to expand beyond their core businesses.
If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.
The problem with venality in business is that getting outraged about it makes it easy to miss the systemic problems that venality often disguises.
You can't fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.
We assume that good-looking people are smarter and more effective than they really are, and that homely people are the reverse.
Most corporate name changes are the result of mergers and acquisitions. But these tend to be unimaginative.
Older people do a better job of managing their impulses, and so they're better able to put off putting off.
There does seem to be some evidence that as people get older, they procrastinate less, perhaps because they feel the pressure of time more.
The stock market has an insidious effect on C.E.O.s' moods, because of its impact not just on their companies but on their own bank accounts.
I tend to delay writing by doing more research - it's really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.
The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic.
Congressional Republicans themselves have vehemently defended the idea that preexisting conditions should not be used to deny people insurance.
One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.
The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization's benefits.
Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.
Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.
In the auto industry, there's one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster.
It may be, in the end, that a good society is defined more by how people treat strangers than by how they treat those they know.
Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward.