Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic.
James Surowiecki
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Peoples
Typical
Republic
Corporations
China
American
Way
Shareholders
Corporation
More quotes by James Surowiecki
The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.
James Surowiecki
I tend to have a hard time working on pieces long before they're due. That's why I think the fact that I write a column is really good for me - the column has to be done, and there's no getting around it.
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
One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.
James Surowiecki
Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.
James Surowiecki
Workers who come to the U.S. see their wages and their standard of living boosted sharply simply by crossing the border. That's a good thing, and one of the best arguments for immigration reform, even if you'll rarely hear a politician make it.
James Surowiecki
There does seem to be some evidence that as people get older, they procrastinate less, perhaps because they feel the pressure of time more.
James Surowiecki
In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.
James Surowiecki
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.
James Surowiecki
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.
James Surowiecki
In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.
James Surowiecki
If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.
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
Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.
James Surowiecki
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.
James Surowiecki
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.
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
I think people don't understand compound interest because typically no one ever explains it to them and the level of financial literacy in the US is very low.
James Surowiecki
Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.
James Surowiecki
Meeting external deadlines is much harder than meeting internal ones. On the other hand, internal deadlines sometimes don't feel real, and are therefore easy to evade.
James Surowiecki