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

- James Surowiecki

Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that pr…

- James Surowiecki

Auto repair, piloting, skiing, perhaps even management: these are skills that yield to application, hard work, and native talent. But forecasting an …

- 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 move…

- James Surowiecki

A general principle of good taxation is that similar jobs, and similar kinds of compensation, should be taxed the same way: otherwise, the government…

- James Surowiecki

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 a…

- James Surowiecki

Disasters redistribute money from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, and even from those who once lived in th…

- James Surowiecki

I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we're being exceptionally efficient.

- James Surowiecki

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

- James Surowiecki