James Surowiecki

Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are…

— James Surowiecki

Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.

— James Surowiecki

In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.

— James Surowiecki

You might think of consumption as a fairly passive activity, but buying new products and services is actually pretty risky, at least…

— 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…

— James Surowiecki

Instead of mindlessly tossing billions at or taking billions from the Net as such, investors should be spending their time making sure…

— James Surowiecki

If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the…

— James Surowiecki

There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

— James Surowiecki

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by…

— 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…

— James Surowiecki

What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as 'commoditization.' What the term means is simply the conversion of the…

— James Surowiecki

Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have…

— James Surowiecki

Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw…

— 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…

— 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

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

— James Surowiecki

On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the…

— James Surowiecki

In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly…

— James Surowiecki

Although oil is a commodity, it's still not a commodity like coffee, which, thank God, we will have with us always. At…

— 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…

— James Surowiecki

In industries where a lot of competitors are selling the same product - mangoes, gasoline, DVD players - price is the easiest…

— James Surowiecki

Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads…

— James Surowiecki

Companies often become victims of their own mythologies.

— James Surowiecki

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

— 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…

— James Surowiecki