Quotes from James Surowiecki

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.

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

On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.

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

For most Americans, work is central to their experience of the world, and the corporation is one of the fundamental institutions of American life, with an enormous impact, for good and ill, on how we live, think, and feel.

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.

Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.

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

Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward.

Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.

Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The innovation - microfinance - involves making small loans to poor entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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