Books: Triumph of the Masses

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At the annual west of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition in the fall of 1906, a British scientist named Francis Galton became interested in a weight-judging competition: 800 fairgoers (a diverse group that included butchers, farmers, clerks, housewives, townspeople, smart people, dumb people, average people) tried to guess what a particular ox would weigh after having been slaughtered and dressed. The correct answer was exactly 1,198 lbs. After the judges awarded their prize, Galton borrowed all the entry tickets, did some arithmetic to get the mean of the fairgoers' guesses and found that their collective estimate was ... 1,197 lbs.

The random gathering of people turned out to be an unexpected collective genius at ox-weight appraisal. Starting with this anecdote, James Surowiecki, financial columnist for the New Yorker, builds a fascinating case, summed up in his title and subtitle: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (Doubleday; 296 pages).

Surowiecki's thesis posits an uncanny and generally unconscious collective intelligence working not by top-down diktat but rather in dynamic arrangements of what the economist Friedrich Hayek called "spontaneous order." Surowiecki cites the giant flock of starlings evading a predatory hawk. From the outside, the cloud of birds seems to move in obedience to one mind. In fact, Surowiecki writes, each starling is acting on its own, following four simple rules: "1) stay as close to the middle as possible; 2) stay 2 to 3 body lengths away from your neighbor; 3) do not bump into any other starling; 4) if a hawk dives at you, get out of the way." The result is safety, and a magical, organic coherence of motion--unconscious "wisdom."

The old paradigm on this subject equates crowds with mindless mobs (the bigger the mob, the dumber and more dangerous)--think of lemmings or the Gadarene swine that Jesus sent off the cliff. The old paradigm, no doubt elitist and authoritarian, cherishes the brilliant individual (Leonardo da Vinci or Isaac Newton, who reinvented the universe while hiding from the plague in a country house).

The new paradigm, as formulated by Surowiecki, states that hoi polloi (the many) are weirdly smart and effective, even when a lot of them, as individuals, are average, or below, in their intelligence or their experience with the subject at hand. Surowiecki's sometimes Panglossian view sees a sort of invisible hand shaping the motions and outcomes of group phenomena.