James Surowiecki People Quotations

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.

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.

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.

Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.

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.

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.

As technology improves, on-screen avatars look more and more like real people. When they start looking too real, though, we pull away. These almost-humans aren't quite right; they look creepy, like zombies.

All things being equal, letting people make decisions for themselves will produce smarter outcomes, collectively, than relying on government planners.

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.

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.

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.

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

Companies, like people, don't much like to change.

There does seem to be some evidence that as people get older, they procrastinate less, perhaps because they feel the pressure of time more.

Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw is that most scientific work never gets noticed. Study after study has shown that most scientific papers are read by almost no one, while a small number of papers are read by many people.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

You might say that economic history is the history of people learning to manage risk.

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.

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.