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

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Trust
Environment
Challenges
Also
Things
Breed
Fraud
Capitalism
Challenge

More quotes by James Surowiecki

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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.
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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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In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.
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One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.
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In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.
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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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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.
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On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.
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But, if recent history has taught us anything, it’s that self-regulation doesn’t work in finance, and that worries about reputation are a weak deterrent to corporate malfeasance.
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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.
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Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.
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Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.
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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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The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed.
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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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