James Surowiecki Quotes

#1. Being out of a job can erode people's confidence and their sense of possibility; and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong.

James Surowiecki

#2. The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization's benefits.

James Surowiecki

#3. One of the problems that exacerbates procrastination is the feeling that you have lots of different things to do and no clear sense of which matter more, when they should be done, etc.

James Surowiecki

#4. I typically don't adopt the ascetic approach. In part, that's because I do use the Net for research even as I'm writing (to check facts, or so on). But I think it's also because I find the possibility of distraction comforting.

James Surowiecki

#5. If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.

James Surowiecki

#6. If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong.

James Surowiecki

#7. Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.

James Surowiecki

#8. Critics of consumer capitalism like to think that consumers are manipulated and controlled by those who seek to sell them things, but for the most part it's the other way around: companies must make what consumers want and deliver it at the lowest possible price.

James Surowiecki

#9. 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.

James Surowiecki

#10. Tough times have always lent themselves to nativist sentiments and closed-door policies. But in the case of highly skilled immigrants, these policies are a recipe for stagnation.

James Surowiecki

#11. Of course, politicians always say they're just describing their opponents' positions, even if they are in fact offering absurd caricatures, if not outright lies.

James Surowiecki

#12. I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.

James Surowiecki

#13. 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.

James Surowiecki

#14. Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence.

James Surowiecki

#15. Most corporate name changes are the result of mergers and acquisitions. But these tend to be unimaginative.

James Surowiecki

#16. In some respects, the video-game business is a lot like the razor business, which follows a simple model: Give away the razor, gouge 'em on the price of the blades.

James Surowiecki

#17. Discussions of health care in the U.S. usually focus on insurance companies, but, whatever their problems, they're not the main driver of health-care inflation: providers are.

James Surowiecki

#18. Flexible supply chains are great for multinationals and consumers. But they erode already thin profit margins in developing-world factories and foster a pell-mell work environment in which getting the order out the door is the only thing that matters.

James Surowiecki

#19. You might think of consumption as a fairly passive activity, but buying new products and services is actually pretty risky, at least if you value your time and money.

James Surowiecki

#20. Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.

James Surowiecki

#21. I think people don't understand compound interest because typically no one ever explains it to them and the level of financial literacy in the US is very low.

James Surowiecki

#22. The paradox of Steve Jobs's career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers - he was famously dismissive of market research - yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.

James Surowiecki

#23. You'll sometimes hear from people that they actually do a better job of getting their work done when they have a lot of other obligations - in effect, it removes the possibility of procrastinating.

James Surowiecki

#24. Art collecting has traditionally been the domain of wealthy individuals in search of rewards beyond the purely financial.

James Surowiecki

#25. Technological innovation has dramatically lowered the cost of computing, making it possible for large numbers of consumers to own powerful new technologies at reasonably low prices.

James Surowiecki

#26. Procrastination also can be a way of self-handicapping: if you don't do a great job, you can always say to yourself, "If I'd only started sooner, I'd have been able to produce something excellent."

James Surowiecki

#27. In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals, herd together for protection.

James Surowiecki

#28. Workers who come to the U.S. see their wages and their standard of living boosted sharply simply by crossing the border. That's a good thing, and one of the best arguments for immigration reform, even if you'll rarely hear a politician make it.

James Surowiecki

#29. 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.

James Surowiecki

#30. The Xbox 360 is the best game console ever designed. It's fast and powerful - games look as good on the 360 as on high-end PCs that cost six times as much. It's easy to navigate and has lots of useful secondary features - the ability to play digital video, stream MP3s, and so on.

James Surowiecki

#31. What the investment community does like is short-term measures designed to boost share prices.

James Surowiecki

#32. Steve Jobs was rare: a C.E.O. who actually had a huge impact on his company's fortunes. Contrary to corporate mythology, most C.E.O.s could be easily replaced, if not by your average Joe, then by your average executive vice-president. But Jobs genuinely earned the label of superstar.

James Surowiecki

#33. Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.

James Surowiecki

#34. Medical tourism can be considered a kind of import: instead of the product coming to the consumer, as it does with cars or sneakers, the consumer is going to the product.

James Surowiecki

#35. To be sure, if you watch CNBC all day long you'll pick up some interesting news about particular companies and the economy as a whole. Unfortunately, to get to the useful information, you have to wade through reams of useless stuff, with little guidance on how to distinguish between the two.

James Surowiecki

#36. If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.

James Surowiecki

#37. I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we're being exceptionally efficient.

James Surowiecki

#38. You can't fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.

James Surowiecki

#39. Sometimes you have to destroy your business in order to save it.

James Surowiecki

#40. Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.

James Surowiecki

#41. If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.

James Surowiecki

#42. There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

James Surowiecki

#43. Businesses that have gone through an episode of hyperinflation become understandably alert to the threat of it: at the first hint of inflation, they're likely to increase prices, since they've learned that if they don't, and inflation hits, their businesses will be wrecked.

James Surowiecki

#44. Until the nineteen-seventies, Western countries paid little attention to corruption overseas, and bribery was seen as an unpleasant but necessary part of doing business there. In some European countries, businesses were even allowed to deduct bribes as an expense.

James Surowiecki

#45. The world's central banks and the International Monetary Fund still have vaults full of bullion, even though currencies are no longer backed by gold. Governments hold on to it as a kind of magic symbol, a way of reassuring people that their money is real.

James Surowiecki

#46. Addictive behavior is kind of the inverse of procrastination: procrastination is about not being able to do what you want to do, addiction about not being able to not do what you don't want to do (drink, use drugs, etc.)

James Surowiecki

#47. Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they're greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly.

James Surowiecki

#48. Punk rock has never really had much patience with musical virtuosity. Actually, it'd be more accurate to say that for most of its history, punk has been actively hostile to virtuosity.

James Surowiecki

#49. The truth is that the United States doesn't need, and shouldn't have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.

James Surowiecki

#50. I think there is clearly a connection between free time and procrastination. The more you have of the former, all things being equal, the more likely you are to procrastinate.

James Surowiecki

#51. In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.

James Surowiecki

#52. The reason advertising is governed by fear, after all, is that most agencies rely on just a few clients to bring in the lion's share of their revenues.

James Surowiecki

#53. Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for a few days and you'll be thin for life.

James Surowiecki

#54. Although oil is a commodity, it's still not a commodity like coffee, which, thank God, we will have with us always. At some point the oil will run out.

James Surowiecki

#55. If we want our regulators to do better, we have to embrace a simple idea: regulation isn't an obstacle to thriving free markets; it's a vital part of them.

James Surowiecki

#56. The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.

James Surowiecki

#57. In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.

James Surowiecki

#58. I do think that procrastination evolved in humans for good reasons. If you're trying to stay alive as a human being on the savanna 20,000 years ago, worrying about what's right behind that bush is a lot more important than worrying about what might happen three weeks from now.

James Surowiecki

#59. A consumer-finance agency is a good thing, but it would do well to teach consumers a simple lesson: if you don't understand the deal you're making, don't make it.

James Surowiecki

#60. The value of a currency is, ultimately, what someone will give you for it - whether in food, fuel, assets, or labor. And that's always and everywhere a subjective decision.

James Surowiecki

#61. 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.

James Surowiecki

#62. When Americans think of college these days, the first word that often comes to mind is 'debt.' And from 'debt' it's just a short hop to other unpleasant words, like 'payola,' 'kickback,' and 'bribery.'

James Surowiecki

#63. The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.

James Surowiecki

#64. Traditionally, tours were a means of promoting a record. Today, the record promotes the tour.

James Surowiecki

#65. The business of America shouldn't be subsidizing business.

James Surowiecki

#66. Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward.

James Surowiecki

#67. The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let's try importing some human capital instead.

James Surowiecki

#68. In American politics, 'Europe' is usually a code word for 'big government.'

James Surowiecki

#69. For most Americans, work is central to their experience of the world, and the corporation is one of the fundamental institutions of American life, with an enormous impact, for good and ill, on how we live, think, and feel.

James Surowiecki

#70. But, if recent history has taught us anything, it's that self-regulation doesn't work in finance, and that worries about reputation are a weak deterrent to corporate malfeasance.

James Surowiecki

#71. Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.

James Surowiecki

#72. Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.

James Surowiecki

#73. 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.

James Surowiecki

#74. Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future.

James Surowiecki

#75. The problem with venality in business is that getting outraged about it makes it easy to miss the systemic problems that venality often disguises.

James Surowiecki

#76. Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.

James Surowiecki

#77. Popular as Keynesian fiscal policy may be, many economists are skeptical that it works. They argue that fine-tuning the economy is a virtually impossible task, and that fiscal-stimulus programs are usually too small, and arrive too late, to make a difference.

James Surowiecki

#78. There are certainly valid reasons for taking a company private, and it's also possible that C.E.O.s perform better when monitored by a small number of owners in a private company rather than by the dispersed and often uninterested shareholders of a public corporation.

James Surowiecki

#79. In terms of productivity - that is, how much a worker produces in an hour - there's little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth.

James Surowiecki

#80. Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.

James Surowiecki

#81. Groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning, because each member is bringing less and less new information to the table. Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives.

James Surowiecki

#82. You can't be rich unless everyone else agrees that you're rich.

James Surowiecki

#83. There does seem to be some evidence that as people get older, they procrastinate less, perhaps because they feel the pressure of time more.

James Surowiecki

#84. Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.

James Surowiecki

#85. Of course, looking tough on inflation is part of any central banker's job description: if investors believe that inflation is going to get out of control, you end up with higher interest rates and capital flight, and a vicious circle quickly ensues.

James Surowiecki

#86. Republicans like to indict Democrats as anti-corporate zealots.

James Surowiecki

#87. In effect, dividing your attention means that neither (or none) of the things you're working on is really getting the full effect of your intelligence, and that it in the end takes you longer than it would if you did one thing at a time.

James Surowiecki

#88. For a crowd to be smart, the people in it need to be not only diverse in their perspectives but also, relatively speaking, independent of each other. In other words, you need people to be thinking for themselves, rather than following the lead of those around them.

James Surowiecki

#89. Congressional Republicans themselves have vehemently defended the idea that preexisting conditions should not be used to deny people insurance.

James Surowiecki

#90. Companies often become victims of their own mythologies.

James Surowiecki

#91. The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.

James Surowiecki

#92. All things being equal, letting people make decisions for themselves will produce smarter outcomes, collectively, than relying on government planners.

James Surowiecki

#93. Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you'd expect. Aside from the obvious harm - poverty, difficulty paying off debts - it seems to directly affect people's health, particularly that of older workers.

James Surowiecki

#94. If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.

James Surowiecki

#95. Most of the work on multitasking suggests that it generally makes you less efficient, not more.

James Surowiecki

#96. In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.

James Surowiecki

#97. Older people do a better job of managing their impulses, and so they're better able to put off putting off.

James Surowiecki

#98. The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich.

James Surowiecki

#99. 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.

James Surowiecki

#100. Since the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland wants to remain a part of Great Britain, and since Ireland itself has shown little interest in reunification, the IRA's prospects for success through political channels have always been limited.

James Surowiecki