110+ James Surowiecki Quotes On Education, Analysis And Insight

James Surowiecki was an American journalist and author. He wrote for The New Yorker magazine as a financial columnist and was the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, a book that explores the concept of collective intelligence. He also wrote the books The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. Following is our collection on famous quotes by James Surowiecki on leadership, education, love.

Top 10 James Surowiecki Quotes

1. If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.
2. Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.
3. I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we're being exceptionally efficient.
4. The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.
5. Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.
6. In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.
7. Most of the work on multitasking suggests that it generally makes you less efficient, not more.
8. 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.
9. The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.
10. 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.

James Surowiecki Short Quotes

• In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals, herd together for protection.
• Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.
• The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich.
• Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.
• The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed.
• Companies often become victims of their own mythologies.
• The business of America shouldn't be subsidizing business.
• Companies, like people, don't much like to change.
• Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.
• Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.

James Surowiecki Quotes About Wisdom

The problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds. — James Surowiecki

If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom. — James Surowiecki

Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers. — James Surowiecki

James Surowiecki Quotes About Independent

For a crowd to be smart, the people in it need to be not only diverse in their perspectives but also, relatively speaking, independent of each other. In other words, you need people to be thinking for themselves, rather than following the lead of those around them. — 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

The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. — James Surowiecki

Bubbles and crashes are textbook examples of collective decision making gone wrong. In a bubble, all of the conditions that make groups intelligent - independence, diversity, private judgement-disappear. — James Surowiecki

James Surowiecki Quotes About People

In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap. — James Surowiecki

Older people do a better job of managing their impulses, and so they're better able to put off putting off. — James Surowiecki

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. — James Surowiecki

The world's central banks and the International Monetary Fund still have vaults full of bullion, even though currencies are no longer backed by gold. Governments hold on to it as a kind of magic symbol, a way of reassuring people that their money is real. — James Surowiecki

Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing. — 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

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

Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you'd expect. Aside from the obvious harm - poverty, difficulty paying off debts - it seems to directly affect people's health, particularly that of older workers. — James Surowiecki

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

One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying. — James Surowiecki

James Surowiecki Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle. — James Surowiecki

Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The innovation - microfinance - involves making small loans to poor entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries. — James Surowiecki

Campaigns fail if they waste resources courting voters who are unpersuadable or already persuaded. Their most urgent task is to find and persuade the few voters who are genuinely undecided and the larger number who are favorably disposed but need a push to actually vote. — James Surowiecki

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007. — James Surowiecki

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

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

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

Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence. — James Surowiecki

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

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. — James Surowiecki

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

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. — James Surowiecki

Steve Jobs was rare: a C.E.O. who actually had a huge impact on his company's fortunes. Contrary to corporate mythology, most C.E.O.s could be easily replaced, if not by your average Joe, then by your average executive vice-president. But Jobs genuinely earned the label of superstar. — James Surowiecki

Disasters redistribute money from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, and even from those who once lived in the destroyed city to those who replace them. It's remarkable that this redistribution can happen so smoothly and quickly, with devastated regions reinventing themselves in a matter of months. — 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

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." — James Surowiecki

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. — James Surowiecki

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle. — James Surowiecki

Instead of mindlessly tossing billions at or taking billions from the Net as such, investors should be spending their time making sure that it's the future Fords and General Motors of cyberspace that are getting the capital they need. — James Surowiecki

The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn't make people happy. — James Surowiecki

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. — James Surowiecki

Most corporate name changes are the result of mergers and acquisitions. But these tend to be unimaginative. — James Surowiecki

Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape. — James Surowiecki

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. — James Surowiecki

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. — James Surowiecki

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

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. — James Surowiecki

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. — James Surowiecki

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

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

Flexible supply chains are great for multinationals and consumers. But they erode already thin profit margins in developing-world factories and foster a pell-mell work environment in which getting the order out the door is the only thing that matters. — James Surowiecki

Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller. — James Surowiecki

If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources. — James Surowiecki

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. — James Surowiecki

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. — James Surowiecki

The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization's benefits. — 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

The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert's. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you're better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are. — James Surowiecki

Traditionally, tours were a means of promoting a record. Today, the record promotes the tour. — James Surowiecki

A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are. — James Surowiecki

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

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. — James Surowiecki

Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward. — James Surowiecki

Framing effects can be very influential, and to the degree that you can think of a task as close rather than distant, you're more likely to actually get it done. — James Surowiecki

Art collecting has traditionally been the domain of wealthy individuals in search of rewards beyond the purely financial. — James Surowiecki

Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression. — 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

Breaking tasks down into smaller sub-tasks can be very useful. — James Surowiecki

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. — 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

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

Of course, looking tough on inflation is part of any central banker's job description: if investors believe that inflation is going to get out of control, you end up with higher interest rates and capital flight, and a vicious circle quickly ensues. — 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

If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars. — James Surowiecki

Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future. — James Surowiecki

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

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

In effect, dividing your attention means that neither (or none) of the things you're working on is really getting the full effect of your intelligence, and that it in the end takes you longer than it would if you did one thing at a time. — James Surowiecki

Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government. — James Surowiecki

Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake. — James Surowiecki

Behavioral economists have shown that a sizable percentage of people are willing to pay real money to punish people who are taking from a common pot but not contributing to it. Just to insure that shirkers get what they deserve, we are prepared to make ourselves poorer. — 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

The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic. — James Surowiecki

The stock market has an insidious effect on C.E.O.s' moods, because of its impact not just on their companies but on their own bank accounts. — James Surowiecki

What the investment community does like is short-term measures designed to boost share prices. — James Surowiecki

Of course, politicians always say they're just describing their opponents' positions, even if they are in fact offering absurd caricatures, if not outright lies. — James Surowiecki

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

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

Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they're greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly. — James Surowiecki

Addictive behavior is kind of the inverse of procrastination: procrastination is about not being able to do what you want to do, addiction about not being able to not do what you don't want to do (drink, use drugs, etc.) — James Surowiecki

Congressional Republicans themselves have vehemently defended the idea that preexisting conditions should not be used to deny people insurance. — James Surowiecki

We assume that good-looking people are smarter and more effective than they really are, and that homely people are the reverse. — James Surowiecki

On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true. — 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

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. — James Surowiecki

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. — James Surowiecki

On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough. — James Surowiecki

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

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

Life Lessons by James Surowiecki

1. James Surowiecki teaches us to be open to new ideas and to challenge our assumptions in order to find creative solutions to difficult problems.
2. He also encourages us to think critically and to be aware of the power of collective wisdom.
3. Finally, he shows us the importance of staying informed and to recognize the value of different perspectives in order to make the best decisions.