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The Wisdom of Crowds

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

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The Wisdom of Crowds

By: James Surowiecki
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
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About this listen

 In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: 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.

With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.©2004 James Surowiecki; (P)2004 Books on Tape Business Ethics Elections & Political Process Organisational Behavior Politics & Government Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Social Psychology & Interactions Sociology Workplace & Organisational Behavior

Critic reviews

What the crowd is saying about The Wisdom of Crowds:

“The Wisdom of Crowds is dazzling. It is one of those books that will turn your world upside down. It’s an adventure story, a manifesto, and the most brilliant book on business, society, and everyday life that I’ve read in years.”
—Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point

"Most crowds of readers would agree that Jim Surowiecki is one of the most interesting journalists working today. Now he has written a book that will exceed even their expectations. Anyone open to rethinking their most basic assumptions--people who enjoyed The Tipping Point, say--will love this book."
--Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball.

“This book should be in every thinking businessperson’s library. Without exception. At a time when corporate leaders have shown they’re not always deserving of our trust, James Surowiecki has brilliantly revealed that we can trust each other. That we count. That our collective effort is far more important than the lofty predictions of those CEO-kings we have worshipped for too long.”
—Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do With My Life?

“Jim Surowiecki has done the near impossible. He’s taken what in other hands would be a dense and difficult subject and given us a book that is engaging, surprising, and utterly persuasive. The Wisdom of Crowds will change the way you think about markets, economics, and a large swatch of everyday life.”
—Joe Nocera, editorial director of Fortune magazine and author of A Piece of the Action.

“It has become increasingly recognized that the average opinions of groups is frequently more accurate than most individuals in the group. As a special case, economists have spoken of the role of markets in assembling dispersed information. The author has written a most interesting survey of the many studies in this area and discussed the limits as well as the achievements of self-organization.”
—Kenneth Arrow, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and Professor of Economics (Emeritus), Stanford University
All stars
Most relevant
The subject matter for me, was interesting, but the delivery was slightly dry and the primary point that groups of people, thinking independently are collectively much better than small numbers is good. However, the narrative could have been more engaging, and it could do with an update given recent political change.

Interesting, but not quite as engaging as expected

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Some readers seem to feel that Surowiecki stretches this idea further than it really deserves thus leading to some repetition or padding. It didn't feel that way to me. Using genuinely interesting examples the author makes a case for how and why the wisdom of crowds works before going on to clarify the conditions that differentiate this approach from a simple matter of asking a bunch of people what they think and averaging the results. In addition to being just long enough it's also well narrated although the production standards are poor; hence the dropped star. Ten minutes in I no longer noticed the slightly muffled delivery.

All of us are smarter than any of us

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I thought that this was an interesting book, and that it was worth listening to.

Interesting book

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This is an excellent book but is let down by the very poor quality of the audio. I downloaded in a high quality format but both parts of the book sounded like old AM radio. A great pity

Great book -- terrible audio quality

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Classic work on The Wisdom of Crowds, well read by the gravelly Grover Gardner and an optimistic counterweight to the more fashionable Madness of Crowds books, inspired by new-fangled behavioural economics, in turn inspired by Freud. More work needed on the value of asking the crowds though.

Classic anti-elitism tract

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