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

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Almost
Mistrust
Medium
Mediums
Capitalism
Movies

More quotes by James Surowiecki

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Behavioral economists have shown that a sizable percentage of people are willing to pay real money to punish people who are taking from a common pot but not contributing to it. Just to insure that shirkers get what they deserve, we are prepared to make ourselves poorer.
James Surowiecki
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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
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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
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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
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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
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In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.
James Surowiecki
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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
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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
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Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.
James Surowiecki
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Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.
James Surowiecki
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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
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Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.
James Surowiecki
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Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author's own problems with finishing the piece.
James Surowiecki
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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
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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
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Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.
James Surowiecki
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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
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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
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The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential.
James Surowiecki
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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