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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.
James Surowiecki
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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Products
Tourism
Instead
Consumer
Coming
Cars
Doe
Consumers
Going
Medical
Kind
Considered
Import
Product
Sneakers
Car
Imports
More quotes by James Surowiecki
Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.
James Surowiecki
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
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
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
Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.
James Surowiecki
In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.
James Surowiecki
Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.
James Surowiecki
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.
James Surowiecki
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
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.
James Surowiecki
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
Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.
James Surowiecki
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.
James Surowiecki
Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.
James Surowiecki
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.
James Surowiecki
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
Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.
James Surowiecki
Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.
James Surowiecki
Pop music thrives on repetition. You know a song's a hit when you've heard it so often that you'll be happy never to hear it again.
James Surowiecki
What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as 'commoditization.' What the term means is simply the conversion of the market for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered barriers to entry.
James Surowiecki