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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.

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Never
Economy
Union
Bargaining
American
Organized
Industries
Country
Unions
Passage
Done
Workers
Joined
Great
Across
Passages
Heart
Easier
Collectives
Emboldened
Made
Industry
Collective
Remaking
Something
Millions
Depression
Wagner

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Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.
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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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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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Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.
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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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Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.
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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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Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.
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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.
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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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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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No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.
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