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If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources.

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
People
Business
Including
Allocation
Someone
Resources
Bribery
Able
Based
Encourages
Everything
Wants
Criteria
Mean
Decision
Efficient
Really
Company
Paying
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Wrong
Shouldn
World
Means
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Distorts

More quotes by James Surowiecki

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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.
James Surowiecki
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You'll sometimes hear from people that they actually do a better job of getting their work done when they have a lot of other obligations - in effect, it removes the possibility of procrastinating.
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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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.
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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The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization's benefits.
James Surowiecki
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Of course, presidents are always blamed or rewarded for the state of the economy.
James Surowiecki
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In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.
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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Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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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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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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Being out of a job can erode people's confidence and their sense of possibility and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong.
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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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.
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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All things being equal, letting people make decisions for themselves will produce smarter outcomes, collectively, than relying on government planners.
James Surowiecki
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If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.
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