James Surowiecki Quotes
Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.
I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we're being exceptionally efficient.
Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.
Most of the work on multitasking suggests that it generally makes you less efficient, not more.
It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It's hard to prepare for the worst when you think you're the best.
The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.
If we want our regulators to do better, we have to embrace a simple idea: regulation isn't an obstacle to thriving free markets; it's a vital part of them.
Although oil is a commodity, it's still not a commodity like coffee, which, thank God, we will have with us always. At some point the oil will run out.
In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals, herd together for protection.
The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.
The truth is that the United States doesn't need, and shouldn't have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.
Older people do a better job of managing their impulses, and so they're better able to put off putting off.
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.
Procrastination also can be a way of self-handicapping: if you don't do a great job, you can always say to yourself, "If I'd only started sooner, I'd have been able to produce something excellent."
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.
The reason advertising is governed by fear, after all, is that most agencies rely on just a few clients to bring in the lion's share of their revenues.
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.
The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich.
It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.
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.
Most corporate name changes are the result of mergers and acquisitions. But these tend to be unimaginative.
Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.
Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for a few days and you'll be thin for life.
Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.
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.
You can't fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.
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.
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.
The desire for reinvention seems to arise most often when companies hear the siren call of synergy and start to expand beyond their core businesses.
If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.
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.
Punk rock has never really had much patience with musical virtuosity. Actually, it'd be more accurate to say that for most of its history, punk has been actively hostile to virtuosity.
Besides great climates and lovely beaches, California and Greece share a fondness for dysfunctional politics and feckless budgeting.
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.
Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.
Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.
Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.
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.
Discussions of health care in the U.S. usually focus on insurance companies, but, whatever their problems, they're not the main driver of health-care inflation: providers are.
By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.
A consumer-finance agency is a good thing, but it would do well to teach consumers a simple lesson: if you don't understand the deal you're making, don't make it.
