James Surowiecki and The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki has written for The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal. He previously authored “The Bottom Line” column for New York magazine and was a contributing editor at Fortune. Today, he writes a twice-monthly financial column for The New Yorker, and in 2004, published his first book: The Wisdom of Crowds. I read it in late 2005, was utterly enthralled, and have referenced it often in posts here.
The book is an effective counterpoint to one published a century-and-a-half earlier: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by British poet and journalist Charles Mackay. (For additional background on Mackay’s book, see my August 2006 essay for the online edition of a leading public affairs trade publication.)
One of the things that intrigues me most about these decades-separated books and authors is that Surowiecki does not entirely disagree with Mackay. In fact, Surowiecki acknowledges that crowds can make very bad decisions; that mob mentality is just as alive and well in the 21st century as it was in the 19th. But Surowiecki also demonstrates that, under the right conditions (diversity, independence, and decentralization), crowds can make remarkably smart decisions, if their inputs can be systematically aggregated without biasing the results. In fact, under the aforementioned conditions, the aggregated wisdom of crowds can deliver solutions that prove just as smart, if not smarter, than the smartest individuals among us.
Moreover, Surowiecki illustrates how the crowd can deploy its embedded wisdom against multiple types of problems – what he labels:
1. Cognitive problems, which have definitive answers (e.g., the weight of a bull)
2. Coordination problems, which require members of a group (as the name suggests) to productively coordinate their behavior with each other (e.g., buyers and sellers in a marketplace)
3. Cooperation problems, which tackle the challenge of getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together or cooperate (e.g., paying taxes, controlling pollution, etc.)
In his discussion of both (a) the requisite conditions for crowd wisdom and (b) the types of problems crowds can smartly solve, Surowiecki offers an impressive and persuasive range of case studies, from academia, business, economics, science, and government.
Unfortunately, Surowiecki largely limits his discussion of crowd wisdom and politics to a handful of pages in the book’s final chapter. Accordingly, when I finally had the opportunity to interview him, three years after his book’s publication, much of our talk focused on what else we might glean from his studies and apply to the issues to which we political junkies are hopelessly addicted.
The author’s answers will be published next week, exclusively at TMV.
The book is an effective counterpoint to one published a century-and-a-half earlier: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by British poet and journalist Charles Mackay. (For additional background on Mackay’s book, see my August 2006 essay for the online edition of a leading public affairs trade publication.)
One of the things that intrigues me most about these decades-separated books and authors is that Surowiecki does not entirely disagree with Mackay. In fact, Surowiecki acknowledges that crowds can make very bad decisions; that mob mentality is just as alive and well in the 21st century as it was in the 19th. But Surowiecki also demonstrates that, under the right conditions (diversity, independence, and decentralization), crowds can make remarkably smart decisions, if their inputs can be systematically aggregated without biasing the results. In fact, under the aforementioned conditions, the aggregated wisdom of crowds can deliver solutions that prove just as smart, if not smarter, than the smartest individuals among us.
Moreover, Surowiecki illustrates how the crowd can deploy its embedded wisdom against multiple types of problems – what he labels:
1. Cognitive problems, which have definitive answers (e.g., the weight of a bull)
2. Coordination problems, which require members of a group (as the name suggests) to productively coordinate their behavior with each other (e.g., buyers and sellers in a marketplace)
3. Cooperation problems, which tackle the challenge of getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together or cooperate (e.g., paying taxes, controlling pollution, etc.)
In his discussion of both (a) the requisite conditions for crowd wisdom and (b) the types of problems crowds can smartly solve, Surowiecki offers an impressive and persuasive range of case studies, from academia, business, economics, science, and government.
Unfortunately, Surowiecki largely limits his discussion of crowd wisdom and politics to a handful of pages in the book’s final chapter. Accordingly, when I finally had the opportunity to interview him, three years after his book’s publication, much of our talk focused on what else we might glean from his studies and apply to the issues to which we political junkies are hopelessly addicted.
The author’s answers will be published next week, exclusively at TMV.
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