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Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Wall
Insider
Come
Insiders
Great
Dominated
Long
Blown
Way
Depression
World
Apart
Street
Streets

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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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A general principle of good taxation is that similar jobs, and similar kinds of compensation, should be taxed the same way: otherwise, the government is effectively subsidizing some jobs over others.
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In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.
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Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.
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Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads of central banks.
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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.
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All things being equal, letting people make decisions for themselves will produce smarter outcomes, collectively, than relying on government planners.
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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.
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Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.
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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.
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In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nike used to be known as Blue Ribbon Sports. What's now Sara Lee used to be Consolidated Foods. And Exxon was once Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. These were name changes that worked. But for all the ones that do, there are 10 or 20 that don't.
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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.
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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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