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If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong.

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Thought
Technology
Efficient
Expense
Going
Information
Consumers
Consumer
Growing
Slow
Apparently
Company
Companies
Expenses
Wrong
Spread
Cheap
Help
Market
Smaller
Moving
Fortune
Giants
Fragmentation
Helping
Internet
Thrive
Advent

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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.
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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.
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Standards wars involve lots of variables, and understanding them often seems more an art than a science. They generally involve just two big players, and end in a winner-take-all situation.
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I think there is clearly a connection between free time and procrastination. The more you have of the former, all things being equal, the more likely you are to procrastinate.
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Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future.
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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.
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Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.
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The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.
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Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.
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In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.
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When Americans are asked to rank professions in terms of honesty and ethics, insurance agents routinely end up near the bottom of the list - somewhere between politicians and car salesmen. Generally, insurers are seen as clever hucksters who prey on insecurity and ignorance to sell people what they don't need at prices they shouldn't have to pay.
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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.
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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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The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential.
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If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.
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I tend to have a hard time working on pieces long before they're due. That's why I think the fact that I write a column is really good for me - the column has to be done, and there's no getting around it.
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You might think of consumption as a fairly passive activity, but buying new products and services is actually pretty risky, at least if you value your time and money.
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Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.
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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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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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