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The Wisdom of Crowds | 
 enlarge | Author: James Surowiecki
Publisher: Little, Brown
Category: Book
Buy Used: $47.25
Used (4) from $47.25
Rating:  159 reviews
Sales Rank: 2525757
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0316861731
Dewey Decimal Number: 301
EAN: 9780316861731
ASIN: 0316861731
Publication Date: June 3, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Very good use book condition, it has signature inside hardcover, all other pages are very clean, it has No highlighting, no writting or any mark. it a very good use book LIKE-NEW, excepted it has signature inside paperback cover, use wit-out clean it. Same day shipping if process before 5pm eastern time, otherwise will ship next business day.
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| • | Paperback - The Wisdom of Crowds | | • | Paperback - The Wisdom of Crowds | | • | Paperback - Wisdom of Crowds | | • | CD-ROM - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations | | • | Audio Cassette - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations | | • | Audio CD - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations | | • | Kindle Edition - The Wisdom of Crowds | | • | Hardcover - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (Random House Large Print (Paper)) | | • | Hardcover - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations | | • | Audio Download - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few (Unabridged) | | • | Audio Download - The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few |
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Product Description
“No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” —H. L. Mencken
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 154 more reviews...
 Hilarious! September 23, 2008
vlodko (Shoreview, MN USA)
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Hee, hee, hee! This title and this book sure look funny right now (September 22nd, 2008). Do we follow the wisdom of the crowds on Wall Street (which, if left to its own devises will continue to drive financial titans into bankrupcy), or the machinations of the dubious experts (Paulson & Bernanke), who will put us on the hook for hundreds of billions for years to come?
Maybe it's time to dust off that 19th Century classic "The Madness of Crowds" instead of reading this smug balderdash.
Why don't quantum physicists let a crowd predict the Higgs' particle mass-energy? September 16, 2008
A. Panda (Guadalajara, Mexico)
The author's thesis is that the answers of huge numbers of people tend to be more accurate than those of individuals even if these individuals are experts in the specific subject. He makes clear that this is not true for any specific trial in which one individual might score better than the average, but in a series of trials, the crowd outperforms any individual. The author also explains "magnification " of mistakes by peer conformance, a phenomenon that does not occur when the answer comes from a random crowd. Results from crowds or groups should be averaged and not "consensed" in order to obtain unbiased results.
In general I found the author's thesis quite interesting. During an exercise in class on peer conformance, we have seen, how the group's consensus gave a worse result than the best individual answer. Thus I agree with the author that peer conformance is not generating the best results. On the other hand, I doubt that this approach would work with more complex things than assigning magnitudes like weight, value, size, etc. to a common item. I do not believe that this method would come up with a cure for cancer or even assigning a magnitude like mass to a not so well known object like for example a W boson or a quark. It would also be interesting to find out if the crowds can predict the energy at which the 3 forces of nature unite (or even the four forces, including gravity).
All in all a good book.
 wisdom of crowds September 7, 2008
Moira E. Mccaffrey
As the title suggests, this books attempts to explore the collective intelligence of crowds. It covers a variety of settings, from traffic jams to the stock market performance. The book reminds me of Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" but feels a bit more cerebral and densely written.
In talking about the wisdom of crowds, Surowiecki recounts a 1958 study that demonstrates the collective wisdom of groups. Students were asked to meet someone in NYC. They didn't know where to meet, and had no way to talk to the other person ahead of time. Yet the majority of students chose the very same meeting place: the information booth at Grand Central station. Not knowing what time they were supposed to meet, just about all of the students said they would show up at the stroke of noon. "In other words, if you dropped two law students at either end of the biggest city in the world and told them to find each other, there was a very good chance they'd end up having lunch together" (p. 91).
All told, a fun read.
Never judge a book by its cover! August 25, 2008
Declan Trott
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have a confession to make. I started reviewing this book before reading it, based purely on the rather lengthy subtitle `Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations'. First, I planned to make a sneering reference to the dotcom bubble as evidence of this collective wisdom. Then, point to Charles Mackay's classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. How sad that this ignorant journalist had pinched the title but absorbed none of the content. Finish with a brief summary of the theory of information cascades, which shows how it can be individually rational to follow the crowd instead of your own opinion.
I thought all this, and suffered terrible embarrassment, if only in the privacy of my own home. For James Surowiecki, of course, covered all these bases and more. The book is not a mindless hymn to the virtues of the marketplace but a nuanced analysis, supported by many historical and contemporary examples, of the conditions under which groups can and can't make better decisions than even the most brilliant individuals.
He argues that there are
"four conditions that characterize wise crowds: diversity of opinion . . . independence . . . decentralization . . . and aggregation"
Unfortunately, the meaning of these terms is not entirely clear. And later in the book the necessary conditions are whittled down to three, aggregation for some reason being left out. Similarly, his classification of cognition, coordination and cooperation problems is not well explained. Since the entire first half of the book is based on these distinctions, it can be a little hard to follow. The second half, which applies these concepts to real world problems like traffic jams, peer reviewed science, committees, company organization, markets, and democratic government, is much better.
So much for the form of the book. Fortunately, the content is excellent. The pages are crammed with humorous and illuminating tales. My own favorite: In the wake of the Challenger disaster, the stock of the four major contractors involved with the shuttle program all lost value. By the end of the day, Thiokol (who built the solid fuel boosters) was down 12%, the other three only 3%. The next day, the New York Times reported two rumors unconnected with Thiokol and declared there were "no clues". Six months later the Presidential Commission revealed its findings: the O-ring seals on the boosters were responsible. There was no evidence of any insider trading.
If this story does not take your fancy, there are dozens of others to choose from (many from more systematic if less memorable studies). Failures of rationality are given space along with successes: stock bubbles, intelligence failures, the Columbia disaster. Some of the conclusions are commonplace to economists and possibly surprising to those who are not: seemingly "wasteful" competition can be a valuable discovery procedure, central planning fails because those who have the information lack the power and incentive to act on it, fund managers tend to underperform market indexes, prediction markets (which were so strongly rejected when proposed for terrorism) are the way of the future. And some may be shocking to economists and commonplace to everyone else: sometimes the collective good is served by individually irrational decisions, such as voting or paying taxes.
Like Freakonomics, The Wisdom of Crowds is based on a wealth of informative and amusing material that is partly spoiled by its presentation. Unlike Freakonomics, it is a book which is unashamedly devoted to one central theme. As such, the sheer abundance of information is sometimes a distraction. It also lacks an index, which can be a considerable nuisance. A little pruning, combined with clear and consistent terminology and organisation, would have lifted this book into the five-star category.
Originally published in the Economic Record, September 2006.
 Excellent Primer August 24, 2008
Jeffrey Card
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There's a reason why democracy is the crappiest form of government, except all others (to paraphrase somebody famous).
The theme of this book is that groups of people are smarter than individual people. It's sort of counterintuitive to the American spirit of individualism, but James Surowiecki does a creditable job of providing a good case to support his thesis in a very readable format. Anyone who regularly works in problem-solving groups will immediately recognize the fundamental truth of the author's message.
It contains excellent (and entertaining) historical examples that should provide plenty of food-for-thought for any student of government, economics or history. Which means, in a perfect world, it should provide something of interest for just about any participant in any collaborative, collective or power-sharing structure (ie, any effective organization, and a double-dose for every ineffective organization).
My only problem with this volume (and it's not really a problem) is that Surowiecki didn't go far enough. He could have productively doubled the size of this book, and given many more prescriptive formulas for effective group participation and leadership. It would provide a great counter-weight to a number of existing works that seem to suggest the same thing (but are far more tedious). A good updating would be helpful as well (considering the plethora of abundant, and more recent, examples of the disasters of individual [or 'siloed'] decision-making).
In its current form, the book is a great primer on the subject; in an expanded format it could be enormously powerful. His basic thesis, however, could not be more relevant. I strongly recommend it.
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