James Surowiecki Quotes

Investors, most of them, have a herd mentality. They want to invest only if other people are investing

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.

The possibility that stock value in aggregate can become irrationally high is contrary to the hard-form "efficient market" theory that many of you once learned as gospel from your mistaken professors of yore. Your mistaken professors were too much influenced by "rational man" models of human behavior from economics and too little by "foolish man" models from psychology and real-world experience.

A pack of lemmings looks like a group of rugged individualists compared with Wall Street when it gets a concept in its teeth.

A conventional valuation which is established as the outcome of the mass psychology of a large number of ignorant individuals is liable to change violently as the result of a sudden fluctuation of opinion due to factors which do not really make much difference to the prospective yield; since there will be no strong roots of conviction to hold it steady.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

Men are herd animals, and prefer to go with the flow, especially when moving in the other direction is harsh.

America's about individuals, not about averages or groups.

… a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for themselves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who compose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours…

You don’t want an appointee who will agree with you all the time. If two smart people are both thinking they are going to disagree with each other sooner or later. You want an appointee who may not always agree with you but one of whom you can always be proud.

How does nature amplify the intelligence of groups? It forms swarms.

I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever.

Sisterhood is a powerful metaphor; it ought not become a synonym for groupthink.

I've always been sceptical about the notion that the market is a person you can engage in an argument with, and that that person is an intelligent, rational, well-intentioned person: it is fantasy. We know that ... the market is subject to irrational optimism and pessimism, and is vindictive ... You're dealing with a crazy man ... Having got what he wants he will still kill you.

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism. Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.

Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.

I'd rather look ridiculous when everybody else does than plain and sensible all by myself.

Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed -- humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel.

In certain countries, people seem to be think that three asses together make one intelligent person. However, that is completely wrong. Several asses in concreto make the ass in abstracto and that is a most terrifying animal.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.

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