Medical tourism can be considered a kind of import: instead of the product coming to the consumer, as it does with cars or sneakers, the consumer is going to the product. – James Surowiecki
Tough times have always lent themselves to nativist sentiments and closed-door policies. But in the case of highly skilled immigrants, these policies are a recipe for stagnation. – James Surowiecki
The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they’ve been politically repressive. – James Surowiecki
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. – James Surowiecki
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. – James Surowiecki
The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let’s try importing some human capital instead. – James Surowiecki
In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled. – James Surowiecki
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
Punk rock has never really had much patience with musical virtuosity. Actually, it’d be more accurate to say that for most of its history, punk has been actively hostile to virtuosity. – James Surowiecki
Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence. – James Surowiecki
Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape. – James Surowiecki
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. – James Surowiecki
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
If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we’d all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars. – James Surowiecki
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. – James Surowiecki
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. – James Surowiecki
Workers who come to the U.S. see their wages and their standard of living boosted sharply simply by crossing the border. That’s a good thing, and one of the best arguments for immigration reform, even if you’ll rarely hear a politician make it. – James Surowiecki
Politically speaking, it’s always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future. – James Surowiecki
Of course, plenty of people don’t think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government. – James Surowiecki
In terms of productivity – that is, how much a worker produces in an hour – there’s little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth. – James Surowiecki
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. – James Surowiecki
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. – James Surowiecki
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
The fundamental problem with banks is what it’s always been: they’re in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky. – James Surowiecki
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. – James Surowiecki
A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are. – James Surowiecki
Congressional Republicans themselves have vehemently defended the idea that preexisting conditions should not be used to deny people insurance. – James Surowiecki