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Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Morally
Compelling
Politics
Doesn
Real
Thriller
Make
Thrillers
Ambiguous
Messy

More quotes by James Surowiecki

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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.
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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.
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Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.
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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.
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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.
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In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.
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The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed.
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Of course, presidents are always blamed or rewarded for the state of the economy.
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What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as 'commoditization.' What the term means is simply the conversion of the market for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered barriers to entry.
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Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.
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Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.
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In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.
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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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Breaking tasks down into smaller sub-tasks can be very useful.
James Surowiecki
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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.
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