Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

James Surowiecki, fully James Michael Surowiecki

American Journalist, Staff Writer at the New York Times

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author's own problems with finishing the piece."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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 judgment--disappear."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Companies have long gathered data to break down their customer base into specific segments. Now political parties have become adept at micro-targeting, too, using data on shopping habits, leisure activities, voting histories, charity donations, and so on, in order to pinpoint likely supporters and the type of appeal most likely to win them over."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing."

"Companies often become victims of their own mythologies."

"Companies, like people, don't much like to change."

"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."

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

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

"Disasters redistribute money from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, and even from those who once lived in the destroyed city to those who replace them. It's remarkable that this redistribution can happen so smoothly and quickly, with devastated regions reinventing themselves in a matter of months."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Google started in 1998, at a time when Yahoo! Seemed to have a stranglehold on the search business ? and if Yahoo! Stumbled, then AltaVista or Lycos looked certain to be the last man standing. But within a couple of years, Google had become the default search engine for anyone who used the internet regularly, simply because it was able to do a better job of finding the right page quickly. And the way it does that ? and does it while surveying three billion Web pages ? is built on the wisdom of crowds. Google keeps the details of its technology to itself, but the core of the Google system is the PageRank algorithm, which was first defined by the company?s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, in a now-legendary 1998 paper called ?The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.? PageRank is an algorithm ? a calculating method ? that attempts to let all the Web pages on the Internet decide which pages are most relevant to a particular search. Here?s how Google puts it: PageRank capitalizes on the uniquely democratic characteristic of the web by using it?s vast link structure as an organizational tool. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google assesses a page?s importance by the votes it receives. But Google looks at more than sheer volume of votes, or links; it also analyses the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ?important? weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ?important.? In that 0.12 seconds, what Google is doing is asking the entire Web to decide which page contains the most useful information, and the page that gets the most votes goes first on the list. And that page, or the one immediately beneath it, more often than not is in fact the one with the most useful information. Now, Google is a republic, not a perfect democracy. As the description says, the more people that have linked to a page, the more influence that page has on the final decision. The final vote is a ?weighted average? ? just as stock price or an NFL point spread is ? rather than a simple average like the ox-weighers? estimate. Nonetheless, the big sites that have the more influence over the crowd?s final verdict have that influence only because of all the votes that smaller sites have given them. If smaller sites were giving the wrong sites too much influence, Google?s search results would not be accurate. In the end, the crowd still rules. To be smart at the top, the system has to be smart all the way through."

"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 being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars."

"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."

"If army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule: Just do what the ant in front of you does. The ants eventually end up in a circle. There?s this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days; the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died."

"If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money."

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

"If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources."

"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."

"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."

"If you work for Google or Apple, stock options give you a chance to share in the increasing value of the company. In the N.F.L., nothing like this happens; the players, though rich, are just working stiffs like the rest of us."

"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."

"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."

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

"In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance."

"In industries where a lot of competitors are selling the same product - mangoes, gasoline, DVD players - price is the easiest way to distinguish yourself. The hope is that if you cut prices enough you can increase your market share, and even your profits. But this works only if your competitors won't, or can't, follow suit."

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