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In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.
James Surowiecki
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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Real
Labor
Value
Source
Historically
Struggle
Owned
Company
Assets
Values
Controlled
Often
Capital
Hard
Companies
More quotes by James Surowiecki
In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.
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The truth is that the United States doesn't need, and shouldn't have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.
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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.
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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.
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If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.
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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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Companies, like people, don't much like to change.
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Breaking tasks down into smaller sub-tasks can be very useful.
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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.
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Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers.
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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.
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If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.
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Medical tourism can be considered a kind of import: instead of the product coming to the consumer, as it does with cars or sneakers, the consumer is going to the product.
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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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Critics of consumer capitalism like to think that consumers are manipulated and controlled by those who seek to sell them things, but for the most part it's the other way around: companies must make what consumers want and deliver it at the lowest possible price.
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The business of America shouldn't be subsidizing business.
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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.
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Of course, presidents are always blamed or rewarded for the state of the economy.
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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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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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