James Surowiecki Quotes

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

— James Surowiecki

“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

“Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.”

— James Surowiecki

If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources.

— James Surowiecki

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

— James Surowiecki

“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

“In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.”

— James Surowiecki

“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

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

“Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.”

— James Surowiecki

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

“Markets work best when there's lots of information available and a historical track record to go on; they excel at predicting things like horse races, election outcomes, and box-office results. But they're bad at predicting things like who will be the next Supreme Court nominee, as that depends on the whim of the president.”

— James Surowiecki

“Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment by fathers to the future well-being of their families.”

— James Surowiecki

“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

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

— James Surowiecki

“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

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

— James Surowiecki

“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

“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

“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

Unlike fuel-economy standards, the most common method of reducing demand for oil over the past thirty years, a gas tax doesn't tell people what kind of car to drive. It simply raises the price of gasoline and lets people adjust their behavior accordingly.

— James Surowiecki

“Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The innovation - microfinance - involves making small loans to poor entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries.”

— James Surowiecki

“On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.”

— James Surowiecki

“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

Campaigns fail if they waste resources courting voters who are unpersuadable or already persuaded. Their most urgent task is to find and persuade the few voters who are genuinely undecided and the larger number who are favorably disposed but need a push to actually vote.

— James Surowiecki

“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

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

— James Surowiecki

“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

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

— James Surowiecki

“In American politics, 'Europe' is usually a code word for 'big government.'”

— James Surowiecki

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Companies, like people, don't much like to change.”

— James Surowiecki

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

— James Surowiecki

“Sometimes you have to destroy your business in order to save it.”

— James Surowiecki

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Auto repair, piloting, skiing, perhaps even management: these are skills that yield to application, hard work, and native talent. But forecasting an uncertain future and deciding the best course of action in the face of that future are much less likely to do so. And much of what we've seen so far suggests that a large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than even the most skilled "decision maker."”

— James Surowiecki

“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

“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

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

— James Surowiecki

“This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have.”

— James Surowiecki

“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