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

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Even
Remarkably
People
Smartest
Smarter
Smart
Circumstances
Groups
Right
Sometimes

More quotes by James Surowiecki

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The truth is that the United States doesn't need, and shouldn't have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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Companies, like people, don't much like to change.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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Meeting external deadlines is much harder than meeting internal ones. On the other hand, internal deadlines sometimes don't feel real, and are therefore easy to evade.
James Surowiecki
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If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed.
James Surowiecki
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Workers who come to the U.S. see their wages and their standard of living boosted sharply simply by crossing the border. That's a good thing, and one of the best arguments for immigration reform, even if you'll rarely hear a politician make it.
James Surowiecki
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The business of America shouldn't be subsidizing business.
James Surowiecki
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The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic.
James Surowiecki
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If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality, though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber.
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.
James Surowiecki
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If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.
James Surowiecki
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The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.
James Surowiecki
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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
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On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.
James Surowiecki