Top 120 James Surowiecki Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— James Surowiecki

102. “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

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

— James Surowiecki

104. “Companies often become victims of their own mythologies.”

— James Surowiecki

105. “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

106. “The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they’ve been politically repressive.”

— James Surowiecki

107. “Art collecting has traditionally been the domain of wealthy individuals in search of rewards beyond the purely financial.”

— James Surowiecki

108. “Of course, plenty of people don’t think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.”

— James Surowiecki

109. “In American politics, ‘Europe’ is usually a code word for ‘big government.’”

— James Surowiecki

110. “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

111. “The oil market is especially sensitive even to a hint of expansion or contraction in supply.”

— James Surowiecki

112. “In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.”

— James Surowiecki

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

— James Surowiecki

114. “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

115. “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

116. “If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don’t need tax loopholes to make money.”

— James Surowiecki

117. “In the auto industry, there’s one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster.”

— James Surowiecki

118. “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

119. “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

120. “Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives. Or, as March has famously argued, they spend too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring.”

— James Surowiecki

121. “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.”

— James Surowiecki

122. “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

123. “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

124. “I tend to have a hard time working on pieces long before they’re due. That’s why I think the fact that I write a column is really good for me – the column has to be done, and there’s no getting around it.”

— James Surowiecki

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

— James Surowiecki

126. “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

127. “Lower oil prices won’t, by themselves, topple the mullahs in Iran. But it’s significant that, historically, when oil prices have been low, Iranian reformers have been ascendant and radicals relatively subdued, and vice versa when prices have been high.”

— James Surowiecki

128. “I do think that procrastination evolved in humans for good reasons. If you’re trying to stay alive as a human being on the savanna 20,000 years ago, worrying about what’s right behind that bush is a lot more important than worrying about what might happen three weeks from now.”

— James Surowiecki

129. “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

130. “Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.”

— James Surowiecki

131. “I tend to delay writing by doing more research – it’s really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.”

— James Surowiecki

132. “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

133. “Although oil is a commodity, it’s still not a commodity like coffee, which, thank God, we will have with us always. At some point the oil will run out.”

— James Surowiecki

134. “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

135. “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