Top 120 James Surowiecki Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— James Surowiecki

53. “You can’t fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.”

— James Surowiecki

54. “I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we’re being exceptionally efficient.”

— James Surowiecki

55. “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

56. “It may be, in the end, that a good society is defined more by how people treat strangers than by how they treat those they know.”

— James Surowiecki

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

— James Surowiecki

58. “In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.”

— James Surowiecki

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “Patrimonial capitalism’s legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.”

— James Surowiecki

63. “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

64. “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

65. “Since the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland wants to remain a part of Great Britain, and since Ireland itself has shown little interest in reunification, the IRA’s prospects for success through political channels have always been limited.”

— James Surowiecki

66. “The business of America shouldn’t be subsidizing business.”

— James Surowiecki

67. “I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.”

— James Surowiecki

68. “Technological innovation has dramatically lowered the cost of computing, making it possible for large numbers of consumers to own powerful new technologies at reasonably low prices.”

— James Surowiecki

69. “If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we’d all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.”

— James Surowiecki

70. “Critics of consumer capitalism like to think that consumers are manipulated and controlled by those who seek to sell them things, but for the most part it’s the other way around: companies must make what consumers want and deliver it at the lowest possible price.”

— James Surowiecki

71. “Of course, presidents are always blamed or rewarded for the state of the economy.”

— James Surowiecki

72. “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

73. “A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are.”

— James Surowiecki

74. “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

75. “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

76. “Corporate welfare isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

— James Surowiecki

77. “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

78. “Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.”

— James Surowiecki

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.”

— James Surowiecki

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “By the time of the ’90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.”

— James Surowiecki

87. “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.”

— James Surowiecki

88. “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

89. “Traditionally, tours were a means of promoting a record. Today, the record promotes the tour.”

— James Surowiecki

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy.”

— James Surowiecki

94. “On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.”

— James Surowiecki

95. “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

96. “Businesses that have gone through an episode of hyperinflation become understandably alert to the threat of it: at the first hint of inflation, they’re likely to increase prices, since they’ve learned that if they don’t, and inflation hits, their businesses will be wrecked.”

— James Surowiecki

97. “Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.”

— James Surowiecki

98. “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

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

— James Surowiecki

100. “Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it’s for a good cause.”

— James Surowiecki