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: Erik Singer

Length: 5 hrs and 53 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 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

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)

Good topic but weakly presented

The topic is excellent and I was interested in it to try to get some insight into what drives web based social networking and wikipedia style systems. The idea that having more people solving a problem (providing that they work together) is better than any individual is solid.

However that's really as far as the book gets. There are a huge number of examples and the author has clearly spent a lot of time reading up. However, sometimes the point of quite lengthy anecdotes is either weakly made, or actually illustrates points counter to the author's intent that are not explored.

The language makes use of "can", "may" and "should" liberally rather than "is", "does" and "will". This comes across as an attempt to mitigate against counter examples by suggesting a trend rather than a rule. This makes me think that the title would be better "The wisdom of some crowds some of the time".

As a previous reviewer said, the basic premise is explained at the start and the stream of examples fails to add much, in some cases actually making you rethink some of the author's statements.

In my estimation it does not try to credit or explain anomalies like warren buffet or steve jobs. But maybe I'm wrong.

I give it three stars for having a good topic and for the time it must have taken researching the examples.