James Surowiecki
James Surowiecki
James Michael Surowieckiis an American journalist. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes a regular column on business and finance called "The Financial Page"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
care driver health insurance main providers whatever
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.
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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.
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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.
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The stock market has an insidious effect on C.E.O.s' moods, because of its impact not just on their companies but on their own bank accounts.
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You might say that economic history is the history of people learning to manage risk.
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The problem with venality in business is that getting outraged about it makes it easy to miss the systemic problems that venality often disguises.
business follows
In some respects, the video-game business is a lot like the razor business, which follows a simple model: Give away the razor, gouge 'em on the price of the blades.
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The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let's try importing some human capital instead.
choices political risk
Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads of central banks.
doors order world
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.
focus care problem
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.
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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.
might corporations crash
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.
party winning leisure-activities
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.