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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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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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Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.
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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.
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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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In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.
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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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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.
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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.
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If army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule:Just do what the ant in front of you does. The ants eventually end up in a circle. There's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died.
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In terms of productivity - that is, how much a worker produces in an hour - there's little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth.
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Companies, like people, don't much like to change.
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Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.
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The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.
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Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.
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Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author's own problems with finishing the piece.
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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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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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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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