Top 70 James Surowiecki Quotes

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.

In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Unlike most government programs, Social Security and, in part, Medicare are funded by payroll taxes dedicated specifically to them. Some of the tax revenue pays for current benefits; anything that’s left over goes into trust funds for the future. The programs were designed this way for political reasons.

In American politics, ‘Europe’ is usually a code word for ‘big government.’

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.

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

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.’

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

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

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.

Corporate welfare isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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.

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they’d never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

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 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.

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.

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

Companies, like people, don’t much like to change.

There’s no debt limit in the Constitution.

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

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

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.

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.

Lower oil prices won’t, by themselves, topple the mullahs in Iran. But it’s significant that, historically, when oil prices have been low, Iranian reformers have been ascendant and radicals relatively subdued, and vice versa when prices have been high.

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

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.

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.

Movies’ mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.