James Surowiecki Quotes

• You might think of consumption as a fairly passive activity, but buying new products and services is actually pretty risky, at least if you value your time and money.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fairly, Consumption

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Standard

• When Americans think of college these days, the first word that often comes to mind is ‘debt.’ And from ‘debt’ it’s just a short hop to other unpleasant words, like ‘payola,’ ‘kickback,’ and ‘bribery.’

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in College

  Tags in Unpleasant, Debt

• When Americans are asked to rank professions in terms of honesty and ethics, insurance agents routinely end up near the bottom of the list – somewhere between politicians and car salesmen. Generally, insurers are seen as clever hucksters who prey on insecurity and ignorance to sell people what they don’t need at prices they shouldn’t have to pay.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Honesty

  Tags in Insecurity, Ignorance

• When all is said and done, cheap gas is an illusion, because our reliance on gas creates a whole series of costs that aren’t factored in to the pump price – among them congestion, pollution, and increased risk of accidents.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Risk

  Tags in Series, Pollution

• What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as ‘commoditization.’ What the term means is simply the conversion of the market for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered barriers to entry.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Corporations, Phenomenon

• What an economy really wants, after all, is not more investment per se but better investment. It wants capital to flow to companies that will create value – not in the form of a rising stock price but in the form of more goods for less cost, more jobs, and rising wages – by enhancing productivity.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Investment, Goods

• Until the nineteen-seventies, Western countries paid little attention to corruption overseas, and bribery was seen as an unpleasant but necessary part of doing business there. In some European countries, businesses were even allowed to deduct bribes as an expense.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Western, Bribes

• Unlike most government programs, Social Security and, in part, Medicare are funded by payroll taxes dedicated specifically to them. Some of the tax revenue pays for current benefits; anything that’s left over goes into trust funds for the future. The programs were designed this way for political reasons.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Funded, Programs

• Unlike fuel-economy standards, the most common method of reducing demand for oil over the past thirty years, a gas tax doesn’t tell people what kind of car to drive. It simply raises the price of gasoline and lets people adjust their behavior accordingly.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Lets, Behavior

• Tough times have always lent themselves to nativist sentiments and closed-door policies. But in the case of highly skilled immigrants, these policies are a recipe for stagnation.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Themselves, Immigrants

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Guidance, Wade

• There are certainly valid reasons for taking a company private, and it’s also possible that C.E.O.s perform better when monitored by a small number of owners in a private company rather than by the dispersed and often uninterested shareholders of a public corporation.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Private, Company

• The Xbox 360 is the best game console ever designed. It’s fast and powerful – games look as good on the 360 as on high-end PCs that cost six times as much. It’s easy to navigate and has lots of useful secondary features – the ability to play digital video, stream MP3s, and so on.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Ability

  Tags in Console, Digital

• The value of a currency is, ultimately, what someone will give you for it – whether in food, fuel, assets, or labor. And that’s always and everywhere a subjective decision.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Currency, Value

• 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.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Country

  Tags in Ceiling, Exception

• 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.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Revenues, Governed

• The paradox of Steve Jobs’s career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers – he was famously dismissive of market research – yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Listening, Paradox

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Largely, Remarkable

• The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.

  James Surowiecki

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Series, Missed

James Surowiecki (133)

Birth:	30th April, 1967
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Journalist

About

James Michael Surowiecki was born in Meriden, Connecticut, USA. He is an American journalist. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he wrote a regular column on business and finance called "The Financial Page". He studied at Southwestern Educational Society, Choate Rosemary Hall, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Yale University. He is married to Slate culture editor Meghan O'Rourke. His writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Motley Fool, Foreign Affairs, Artforum, Wired, and Slate. Before joining The New Yorker, he wrote “The Bottom Line” column for New York magazine and was a contributing editor at Fortune. He is the author of book, entitled The Wisdom of Crowds.

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Deaths

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• 1988 - Sheilah Graham
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