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Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads of central banks.

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Much
Manage
Personal
Risk
Choices
Banks
Whether
Ministers
Comes
Heads
Political
Central
Hard
Prime

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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.
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The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes.
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Businesses that have gone through an episode of hyperinflation become understandably alert to the threat of it: at the first hint of inflation, they're likely to increase prices, since they've learned that if they don't, and inflation hits, their businesses will be wrecked.
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One of the problems that exacerbates procrastination is the feeling that you have lots of different things to do and no clear sense of which matter more, when they should be done, etc.
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In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy.
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Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.
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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.
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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.
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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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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 heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.
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Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.
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On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.
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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.
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Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.
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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.
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In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.
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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 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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In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.
James Surowiecki