Surowiecki Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

James Surowiecki

#4. 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

#5. Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.

James Surowiecki

#6. 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.

James Surowiecki

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are.

James Surowiecki

#10. By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

James Surowiecki

#11. 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

#12. From a social point of view, it's beneficial that homeownership encourages commitment to a given town or city. But, from an economic point of view, it's good for people to be able to leave places where there's less work and move to places where there's more.

James Surowiecki

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

James Surowiecki

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

James Surowiecki

#19. Standards wars involve lots of variables, and understanding them often seems more an art than a science. They generally involve just two big players, and end in a winner-take-all situation.

James Surowiecki

#20. 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

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

James Surowiecki

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

James Surowiecki

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

James Surowiecki

#24. 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.

James Surowiecki

#25. It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It's hard to prepare for the worst when you think you're the best.

James Surowiecki

#26. 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

#27. In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.

James Surowiecki

#28. 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

#29. In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy.

James Surowiecki

#30. 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

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

James Surowiecki

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

James Surowiecki

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. I tend to have a hard time working on pieces long before they're due. That's why I think the fact that I write a column is really good for me - the column has to be done, and there's no getting around it.

James Surowiecki

#36. We assume that good-looking people are smarter and more effective than they really are, and that homely people are the reverse.

James Surowiecki

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.

James Surowiecki

#40. When all is said and done, cheap gas is an illusion, because our reliance on gas creates a whole series of costs that aren't factored in to the pump price - among them congestion, pollution, and increased risk of accidents.

James Surowiecki

#41. 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

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

James Surowiecki

#43. 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

#44. Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most people's salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.

James Surowiecki

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. As technology improves, on-screen avatars look more and more like real people. When they start looking too real, though, we pull away. These almost-humans aren't quite right; they look creepy, like zombies.

James Surowiecki

#48. Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers.

James Surowiecki

#49. If you work for Google or Apple, stock options give you a chance to share in the increasing value of the company. In the N.F.L., nothing like this happens; the players, though rich, are just working stiffs like the rest of us.

James Surowiecki

#50. The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they've been politically repressive.

James Surowiecki

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

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

James Surowiecki

#56. Nike used to be known as Blue Ribbon Sports. What's now Sara Lee used to be Consolidated Foods. And Exxon was once Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. These were name changes that worked. But for all the ones that do, there are 10 or 20 that don't.

James Surowiecki

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. Of the various kinds of intelligence, generosity is the first.

Gienka Home from the Ball Bearing Plant (1943)

John Surowiecki

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

James Surowiecki

#63. 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

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

James Surowiecki

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

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

James Surowiecki

#71. 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

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

James Surowiecki

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. Of course, presidents are always blamed or rewarded for the state of the economy.

James Surowiecki

#79. 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

#80. The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.

James Surowiecki

#81. Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.

James Surowiecki

#82. 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

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

James Surowiecki

#84. Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.

James Surowiecki

#85. 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

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

James Surowiecki

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. Companies, like people, don't much like to change.

James Surowiecki

#91. A general principle of good taxation is that similar jobs, and similar kinds of compensation, should be taxed the same way: otherwise, the government is effectively subsidizing some jobs over others.

James Surowiecki

#92. The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic.

James Surowiecki

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

James Surowiecki

#94. On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.

James Surowiecki

#95. 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

#96. Besides great climates and lovely beaches, California and Greece share a fondness for dysfunctional politics and feckless budgeting.

James Surowiecki

#97. Bubbles and crashes are textbook examples of collective decision making gone wrong. In a bubble, all of the conditions that make groups intelligent - independence, diversity, private judgement-disappear.

James Surowiecki

#98. Meeting external deadlines is much harder than meeting internal ones. On the other hand, internal deadlines sometimes don't feel real, and are therefore easy to evade.

James Surowiecki

#99. You might say that economic history is the history of people learning to manage risk.

James Surowiecki

#100. 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