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Behavioral economists have shown that a sizable percentage of people are willing to pay real money to punish people who are taking from a common pot but not contributing to it. Just to insure that shirkers get what they deserve, we are prepared to make ourselves poorer.

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
People
Deserve
Percentage
Pay
Percentages
Taking
Punish
Willing
Contributing
Sizable
Common
Economist
Insure
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Pot
Behavioral
Real
Shown
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Economists

More quotes by James Surowiecki

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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.
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.
James Surowiecki
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Technological innovation has dramatically lowered the cost of computing, making it possible for large numbers of consumers to own powerful new technologies at reasonably low prices.
James Surowiecki
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Companies, like people, don't much like to change.
James Surowiecki
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The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let's try importing some human capital instead.
James Surowiecki
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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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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.
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.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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I typically don't adopt the ascetic approach. In part, that's because I do use the Net for research even as I'm writing (to check facts, or so on). But I think it's also because I find the possibility of distraction comforting.
James Surowiecki
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Breaking tasks down into smaller sub-tasks can be very useful.
James Surowiecki
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One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.
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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The paradox of Steve Jobs's career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers - he was famously dismissive of market research - yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.
James Surowiecki
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In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.
James Surowiecki
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Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.
James Surowiecki
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In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.
James Surowiecki
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In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.
James Surowiecki