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
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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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James Surowiecki
About this listen
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
"The author has a knack for translating the most algebraic of research papers into bright expository prose..." ( The New York Times Book Review)
What listeners say about The Wisdom of Crowds
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- Mark
- 23-11-11
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
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Albert T
- 06-01-21
Classic anti-elitism tract
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.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- Jim
- 27-04-13
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- PapaPete
- 19-07-21
Interesting, but not quite as engaging as expected
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.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- M.
- 03-04-21
Interesting book
I thought that this was an interesting book, and that it was worth listening to.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
- M. Russell
- 23-08-11
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!
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4 people found this helpful