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Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.
James Surowiecki
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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Fun
Real
Capitalism
Failure
Possibility
Becomes
More quotes by James Surowiecki
No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.
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
If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.
James Surowiecki
The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.
James Surowiecki
Technological innovation has dramatically lowered the cost of computing, making it possible for large numbers of consumers to own powerful new technologies at reasonably low prices.
James Surowiecki
In the auto industry, there's one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster.
James Surowiecki
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
The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic.
James Surowiecki
In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.
James Surowiecki
If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.
James Surowiecki
Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.
James Surowiecki
The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality, though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber.
James Surowiecki
Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.
James Surowiecki
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.
James Surowiecki
Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.
James Surowiecki
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.
James Surowiecki
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.
James Surowiecki
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.
James Surowiecki
Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.
James Surowiecki
But, if recent history has taught us anything, it’s that self-regulation doesn’t work in finance, and that worries about reputation are a weak deterrent to corporate malfeasance.
James Surowiecki