The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, Little, Brown/Time Warner Books, £16.99, ISBN 0316861731 Reviewed by Wendy M. Grossman
A DIVERSE crowd can come up with better answers for many problems than the single smartest individual in that crowd. That’s the central idea of The Wisdom of Crowds.
Of course, counter-examples immediately spring to mind, such as the mass of mutual-fund managers versus the very rich investor Warren Buffett. James Surowiecki, who writes an entertaining financial column for The New Yorker, proposes that the more diverse, independent and decentralised a crowd is, the smarter its collective answer. (Draw your own…
