general

Even after having read it, I'm still not sure what category I'd put THE WISDOM OF CROWDS in. It offers important insights into business, and helped me understand the way markets work. But it also has lots of fantastic and entertaining material about group psychology, and it's an interesting look at a host of questions about everyday life, ranging from the way crowds on a sidewalk move to traffic to the role of trust.

The book's real strength is its ability to take a complex question -- when are people in groups smart, and when are they foolish? -- and make it accessible and engaging, even to those of us without much background in the field. Surowiecki has a light touch with his ideas, and for me the book flew by (with the exception of a few pages about the NFL, which I had a hard time with). I feel as if I see the world now in a different way.

It seems naive to mention it, but one of the things I liked best about Surowiecki's take on the intelligence of groups is how optimistic it is. Most of what we hear about crowds and democracy and the potential of average people offers a dismal picture. But I came away from this book in a hopeful mood, and infused with a sense of real possibility. Surowiecki is convincing on the idea that the intelligence of Google, or bettors at the race track, or the audience in "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" aren't peculiar anomalies, but are actually connected by the fact that they're tapping into collective wisdom. This makes me think that if we can figure out a way how to use group intelligence in a wider way -- inside companies, governments, whatever -- the decisions society as a whole makes can be improved.

Stylistically, the book is a delight. The sentences are crisp, and the stories are well-told. Occasionally, Surowiecki makes his ideas too involved and ends up in a digression. But I forgave this because it felt like the result of someone who thinks everything is interesting and wants the reader to feel the same. Wonderful stuff.

Although the subtitle to THE WISDOM OF CROWDS is an awkward mouthful, it is at least accurate: the book does an exceptional job of illuminating a remarkably wide range of material from politics, everyday life, and the business world. Surowiecki's not offering a grand unified theory of everything, but in the course of investigating how and when groups and crowds are and are not intelligent, he takes you on an exhilarating ride. You can't go more than a couple of pages without coming across some interesting factual tidbit or clever anecdote. Just a short list of stuff Surowiecki writes about includes: crowds on city sidewalks, Navy men trying to find a lost submarine, the Nielsen ratings, Google, scientists trying to find the SARS virus, the stock market, game-show audiences, fashion stores, and the C.I.A. Thankfully, though, he understands that just stringing together stories isn't enough. Instead, he fits his examples into a strong argument that holds the book together. You can get a lot out of this book just by dipping into individual chapters, but reading it from beginning to end is a powerful experience.

One of the things about the book that hasn't been much remarked on is the light it sheds on the flaws in the way the U.S. intelligence community -- and, I would argue, the Bush administration -- approaches the problem of forecasting the future and making good decisions. The book's main subject is the wisdom of crowds, but Surowiecki spends a lot of time on how groups go wrong, and his discussion of how groups make bad decisions seems to me completely relevant to our current problems. When Surowiecki delves into groupthink, into the pressure that's exerted on lower-level employees to conform, and the perils of too little diversity of opinion, he's making a broader point about what good decisions require. But in the process, he clarified for me just why the current administration did such a bad job of figuring out whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and of planning for the postwar period. I was surprised, but it turns out this book has a lot to say about the state we're in right now.