The Wisdom of Crowds

Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations

By: James Surowiecki

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. Groups are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

This seemingly counterintuitive notion has endless and major ramifications for how businesses operate, how knowledge is advanced, how economies are (or should be) organized, and how we live our daily lives. With seemingly boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, economic behaviorism, artificial intelligence, military history, and political theory to show just how this principle operates in the real world.

Despite the sophistication of his arguments, Surowiecki presents them in a wonderfully entertaining manner. The examples he uses are all down-to-earth, surprising, and fun to ponder. Why is the line in which you're standing always the longest? Why is it that you can buy a screw anywhere in the world and it will fit a bolt bought ten-thousand miles away? Why is network television so awful? If you had to meet someone in Paris on a specific day but had no way of contacting them, when and where would you meet? Why are there traffic jams? What's the best way to win money on a game show? Why, when you walk into a convenience store at 2:00 A.M. to buy a quart of orange juice, is it there waiting for you? What do Hollywood mafia movies have to teach us about why corporations exist?

The Wisdom of Crowds is a brilliant but accessible biography of an idea, one with important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, conduct our business, and think about our world.

©2004 James Surowiecki (P)2004 Books on Tape

Critic reviews

"Surowiecki's style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory." (Publishers Weekly)

Great book!

I loved the idea and the text as well as the narration but the chapters in the book were not aligned with the ones in the audio book. Meaning that a new chapter could start anywhere and it was difficult to go to the next chapter or re-read the previous one.

Did not succeed to capture my atention

I had some fund listing to maybe the first half, but then this book started to feel repetitive and I lost interest.

not saying much - or perhaps too much!

very talkative book, not much substance, the "theories" are reallty hard to verify/falsify because of their general character.
More of anecdotes then proves.

I wish I could give negative stars

This book has actually made me so angry in reading it that I'm having trouble writing a fair assessment of it. The authors assessment for the "wisdom of crowds" was judged by the fact that if you average people's guesses at the numbers of marbles in a jar, it comes to be rather close. Fine for guessing marbles in a jar, but real world applications of this type of thinking is flawed and arguments for it are left wanting. A good half the arguments he develops in the book are about the stupidity of crowds; leaving me wondering why I even bothered with his trite analysis of "funny and amusing sociological data" The author's world is a sterile and joyless place where the reality of his ideas are about as exciting as this read. The last time I checked "crowds" haven't written any great books, created any symphonies or inspired me to any level like an individual could.

Silly

The book is interesting because the premise is hard to believe. The problem is I think it's hard to believe because it's not true. One of the main examples is how on the Millionaire TV show, the audience lifeline is so much better than phone-a-friend. I've been watching the show a while now to check this out and the author's reasoning is very weak because he's comparing apples and oranges. Usually the constestants pick the audience lifeline first, so they're using it for easier questions which aren't comparable to the harder questions later in the game that they save up the other lifelines for. Very rarely people will use up both of these lifelines on the same question because they don;t trust the lifeline: in those cases that I've seen, the audience was wrong. Also the audience is generally reliable for pop culture types of questions about Britney Spears's baby for example whereas the phone-a-friend is best for soemthing that can be quickly Googled or looked up in the dictionary (although some contestants don't seem to get this). Without controlling for these various factors, the author's conclusions are meaningless. This was something I could check by watching TV. The other examples about lost submarines and whatnot I can't check on my own but if the reasoning is as weak as with this example, it suggests the whole book is wrong.

Don't waste your time

I have only read two hours of this book, and I have no intention of finishing it. During this time, I have been barraged with monotonous examples in which the average answer of the crowd happens to be more accurate than most of the individuals in that crowd. His wordy self-important style of writing leaves me with the feeling that this could instead be a man seeing an enormous number of coincidences, and presenting all the ones that happen to suit his views.

Perhaps the author will decide to get around to some adult level conversation and scientific analysis in the remaining seven hours, but I would not bet on it. And as I still have a splitting headache from the first two hours, I am not about to find out.

Lengthy, and at times, boring to listen to...

After reading the brief information about the audio book and the positive reviews from the readers I eagerly decided to buy it.
Unfortunately for me, the content is simply not related to my level of reading (listening).
I only listened to halve way, of the first downloaded audio book; therefore I am not in a position to comment much; The little I listened to, it dealt with corporations, government agencies. Unfortunately I did not grasp the over all meaning or relation of the information. It was lengthy and boring to listen to.
I decided to pass on, to listen to my other purchased audio books.
In conclusion, I will definitely leave this audio book to listen to it again, in another more appropriate time, in the future... Maybe then, I will come to understand and appreciate its content.
For now I will have to rate it two stars.

The Wisdom of this Book is Grossly Overstated

This book is crammed with many interesting anecdotes about the behavior of markets and the average "wisdom" of groups, and some of it actually has a sound connection to the title and premise of the book. However, as I listened further into the book, I became frustrated with the tedious overexplanations that were often poorly connected to supporting the author's premise. There are some interesting anecdotes, such as "academic" studies of irrationality of investment behavior. Other examples are weak, such as an early anecdote about a crowd guessing the dressed weight of a cow. The author claims that the accuracy of the group's average guess demonstrates the crowd is "smarter" more consistently than any "expert", but this ignores the likelihood that inexpert guesses will tend to cancel each other out and then we're left with whether the result of the "crowd" really boils down to simply averaging the guesses of a handful of experts. Many examples in the book simply demonstrate the type of statistical distribution one might encounter in any group, rather than providing insight into "wisdom" of the crowd.

The best portions of the book deal with the author's categories of group decisions, and some of the pitfalls of small group decision-making. A few suggestions were given for avoiding or minimizing the impact of these pitfalls in small groups, though the treatment was so brief it bordered on being superficial. Still... we're introduced to some interesting ideas on this topic.

The narrator did an adequate job, and generally made the book easier to listen to despite the tedious nature of the author's descriptions.

This book may be worth a listen just for the interesting anecdotes, especially if you have little background with group decision-making, economics, markets, and basic statistical principles.

the wisdom of crowds

compilation of many facts that were worth consideration. Found the book good, not great. I would buy another with the same principles.

Nothing new or insightful... A Business Beach Read

Valuable disjointed research poorly analyzed and interpreted to support a tenuous argument. You know it's bad when you have zero bookmarks