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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780385503860 |
Powells.com Staff Pick
Using anecdotes and statistics from such diverse sources as pre-election polls, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, traffic patterns, and jelly bean jars, The Wisdom of Crowds persuasively demonstrates that groups of people are usually smarter than their most intelligent individuals. Surowiecki, who writes the Financial Page for the New Yorker, brings concision, accessibility, and wit to this counterintuitive but pertinent idea. Jill, Powells.com
Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)
"Surowiecki is the New Yorker's business columnist, and at times his book feels like a series of carefully constructed pieces rather than a whole work. Still, he writes with the patience and geniality of a beloved professor, and his arguments are invariably witty and to the point. The Wisdom of Crowds draws a clear, erudite picture of the mechanisms by which our mass society works, and it is a refreshingly hopeful one." Anna Godbersen, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
"The performance of groups is a wonderful subject, and Surowiecki has a remarkable eye for the telling anecdote, illustrating abstract claims with vivid examples. His central point is convincing. Groups, and even crowds, can be wiser than most and sometimes even all of their members, at least if they aggregate information. But there is a serious problem with Surowiecki's discussion: he does not provide an adequate account of the circumstances that make crowds wise or stupid..." Cass R. Sunstein, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
H. L. Mencken was wrong.
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—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, ant biology, 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.
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Igal, September 20, 2006 (view all comments by Igal)
Can a bunch of strangers out-think a team of focused experts? Under certain conditions, according to this intriguing book, yes. Author James Surowiecki cites numerous experiments and real-life situations to illustrate how a group of diverse people who cooperate in the attempt to solve a problem, and whose efforts are coordinated without compromising each person's independence, will come up with a better answer than even its most intelligent members working alone.
For example, in an attempt to locate a missing submarine, a hastily arranged team of people with very different skill sets came up with coordinates good enough for the military to find the sunken vessel! They had nothing to go on but some facts that had left rescuers clueless, and yet when their answers were averaged, an uncanny precision emerged. Convincing examples like this are provided throughout the book.
Surowiecki's hypothesis is most convincing when he writes about the solutions to specific problems, supporting his arguments with historical fact or known results. Average the guesses to how many jellybeans are in a jar, and you'll almost always get the most accurate answer.
He also hits the mark when he discusses market theory, and how individuals with self-interest make the market work like a smart crowd, sometimes even a wise one. He supports these notions by referring to numerous published studies, famous experiments, and some solid arguments.
It's important to remember that much of the talk on economics cites highly controlled studies, or very limited real-world studies. Life doesn't necessarily work as advertised, and that's why we have laws, regulations, courts, and lots and lots of lawyers.
Surowiecki's thesis also gets a little shaky when he ventures into the smoky world of politics. After all, a roomful of politicians doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the wisdom of crowds (though it does bring to mind the word wiseguys). And didn't a group of "experts" known as the Supreme Court decide an election supposedly meant to be left in the hands of a wise crowd known as the American voters?
Democracy, voting, ideology, these are big, hairy topics, and Surowiecki senses that he won't do them justice in his short book. In the end, he simply repeats a truth that we the public, as a wise crowd, know: Democracy is far from perfect, but still the best system of government we know of. And that, perhaps, is the wisdom of the crowd at work.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780385503860
- Subtitle:
- Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
- Author:
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Doubleday Books
- Location:
- New York
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Sociology - Social Theory
- Subject:
- Common good.
- Subject:
- Consensus
- Subject:
- Consumer Behavior - General
- Subject:
- Political Process - General
- Copyright:
- 2004
- Edition Description:
- Includes bibliographical references.
- Series Volume:
- 1621
- Publication Date:
- May 25, 2004
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 320
- Dimensions:
- 854x582x93 103
