![The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few | [James Surowiecki]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Qa03LpUBL._SL175_.jpg "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few | [James Surowiecki]")
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few
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Average Customer Rating
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LENGTH9 hrs and 26 mins
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RELEASE DATE25/05/2004
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AUDIO FORMATS
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Program TypeAudiobook
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PUBLISHER
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Publisher's Summary
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 Tape
What the Critics Say
"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)
"The author has a knack for translating the most algebraic of research papers into bright expository prose..." (The New York Times Book Review)
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What Members Say
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"All of us are smarter than any of us"
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.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful -
"Great book -- terrible audio quality"
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
1 of 1 people found this review helpful -
"Shoot the messenger"
This book takes an awfully long time to unpack a very simple idea - interesting, persuasive but excessively laboured and wordy. The worst part though is the choice of narrator. Grover Gardner is just plain unbearable, quacking away in a style that destroys the material. Shoot the messanger. Please!
0 of 2 people found this review helpful