
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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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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James Surowiecki
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 Books on TapeListeners also enjoyed...




















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)
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An exceptionally wise book.
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Must read...
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I highly recommend this book.
Very interesting, with a lot of good insights
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Would you listen to The Wisdom of Crowds again? Why?
I intend to listen to this book again because I source it often at work. It's a good and easy read that highlights the phenomenon of group intelligence. It would have been a 5 if it would address the new threat that too much unfiltered information poses to this; i.e. the internet + anyone with a computer can post something = misinformed public.You will quote this book...
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I would not recommend using a credit today for this book because it is outdated by recent events and we have evolved technologically since those days. I do like the authors main theme that groups out perform individuals but he would first need to rewrite his story to explain recent history and include recent tech innovations.
The narrator is one of my favorites and he will make it easy to listen to the whole book in spite of the anachronisms in the narrative.
Outdated today (2013)
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Interesting book
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This book complements the insights from the social media book crowd sourcing. Together, I think they are slowly making inroads in changing way business models work in the U.S., much for the better.
This book is part of a set of books including Chris Anderson's Free, The Long Tale, Clay Shirk's Here Comes Everybody, The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick that help to explain what is happening in the 21st century sociologically, economically and politically. These new trends created predominately by the Internet and then radically expanded by human ingenuity and creativity are moving our world in rapid and exciting ways.
Surprising in Insights -- Scientific Sociology
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To me the wisdom of crowds is still elusive. The author does not seem to touch on any of these examples, and the small scale experiments with students guessing a variable are just not raising to the word ?wisdom? for me.
Try it on, is a good exercise.
One sided point of view
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Much better than expected
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I think about this book all the time
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