Conglomerate Me This: A Review of Surowiecki's The Wisdom of the Crowd

In reading Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, I found myself finally patting myself on the back for being what I’ve always been: average. Finally—someone championing the wisdom of the little guy. The entire book is built around the idea of a crowd knowing what’s best. From figuring out how to maneuver a crowded street to finding lost submarines and judging economics, the crowd has got it down. Surowiecki makes an easily compelling case for the crowd, and he manages to do it in an entertaining way. His book is accessible to his subject matter—those common men, the lay people of the world. I am in no way an expertise, a genius, or a leader; I know very little about digital culture, politics, economics. And yet I was able to understand and—more than that—appreciate Surowiecki’s claims. Even if you don’t agree with the content (and I know some won’t), it is a well-written and enjoyable book.

But, to the point. 

The Wisdom of Crowds highlights various situations, most of them successful, where the crowd rendered an answer either the same or better than the experts opinions. Surowiecki outlines three different types of crowds and explains why it is the crowd that makes sense of the situation. We have our Cognitive, Coordinative, and Cooperative people each with a different success story. The Cognitive is about market judgment, where the crowd is allowed to think through problems, process information, and deliver a solution as a whole. Coordination deals with common cultural understanding and awareness. It comes off as street smarts, where the crowd all knows to walk to the right without really knowing why. And the Cooperation is all about the free market (obviously supported by our Mr. Surowiecki) and the building of networks of trust. He outlines these three “crowds” and their respective successes through various examples until, finally, we feel like we—the collective we!—can do anything. Forget the pros, forget the experts. Elect us! Call on us! Stick it to the man and release the hordes! 

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. After all, the crowd itself isn’t celebrated; rather, their aggregated knowledge is the champion. Even in his examples just in the forward—deciding the ox’s weight or finding the lost submarine—it wasn’t that a crowd gathered together to sort out the best answer. No. Everyone gave their individual answer, someone or some machine inputted the data, and the mean was decided upon. It was that number that was the winner. Not any one conclusion but a conglomeration—a conglomeration dependent on some geniuses mixed in with some idiots standing in a crowd with a bunch of averages. 

So perhaps it’s less of a revolutionary call and more of a celebration of collaboration. It’s the pat on the back from your elementary school teacher after your group project went swimmingly: it’s not about you, it’s about the end result. If it works, it worked; if not, you brush it under the rug and move on. That is both the point, the power, and the depressing reality of this book. Surowiecki tries to champion us simple-minded majority—and he does so in an enlightening fashion. It’s great to read a book about how well we’re doing, how the digital age has allowed us to open up a whole new can of possibilities. But this book is also about how the average remain average, the experts remain experts, and the idiots…well, they’re still stupid. And that's just fine. At least according to Surowiecki.