249 Quotes by James Surowiecki

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.

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

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they’d never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

Corporate welfare isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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.

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.

The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization’s benefits.

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 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.