Quotes from James Surowiecki

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

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.

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

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."

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

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

Discussions of health care in the U.S. usually focus on insurance companies, but, whatever their problems, they're not the main driver of health-care inflation: providers are.

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

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

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.

In American politics, 'Europe' is usually a code word for 'big government.'

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.

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.

The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they've been politically repressive.

Of course, politicians always say they're just describing their opponents' positions, even if they are in fact offering absurd caricatures, if not outright lies.

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

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

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.

Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.

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.

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.

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

There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

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