Top 120 James Surowiecki Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.”

— James Surowiecki

2. “Breaking tasks down into smaller sub-tasks can be very useful.”

— James Surowiecki

3. “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.”

— James Surowiecki

4. “In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.”

— James Surowiecki

5. “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

6. “The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich.”

— James Surowiecki

7. “Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.”

— James Surowiecki

8. “If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.”

— James Surowiecki

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Most of the work on multitasking suggests that it generally makes you less efficient, not more.”

— James Surowiecki

12. “Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment by fathers to the future well-being of their families.”

— James Surowiecki

13. “Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn’t make for a compelling thriller.”

— James Surowiecki

14. “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

15. “Companies, like people, don’t much like to change.”

— James Surowiecki

16. “Sometimes you have to destroy your business in order to save it.”

— James Surowiecki

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

— James Surowiecki

18. “Pop music thrives on repetition. You know a song’s a hit when you’ve heard it so often that you’ll be happy never to hear it again.”

— James Surowiecki

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.”

— James Surowiecki

25. “In the business world, bad news is usually good news – for somebody else.”

— James Surowiecki

26. “The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.”

— James Surowiecki

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Most corporate name changes are the result of mergers and acquisitions. But these tend to be unimaginative.”

— James Surowiecki

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

— James Surowiecki

31. “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

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

— James Surowiecki

33. “In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals, herd together for protection.”

— James Surowiecki

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “From a social point of view, it’s beneficial that homeownership encourages commitment to a given town or city. But, from an economic point of view, it’s good for people to be able to leave places where there’s less work and move to places where there’s more.”

— James Surowiecki

38. “Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart – smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.”

— James Surowiecki

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Besides great climates and lovely beaches, California and Greece share a fondness for dysfunctional politics and feckless budgeting.”

— James Surowiecki

42. “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

43. “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

44. “Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. Errors in individual judgment won’t wreck the group’s collective judgment as long as those errors aren’t systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people’s judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information.”

— James Surowiecki

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed...”

— James Surowiecki

49. “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

50. “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