How long does it take to read The Wisdom of Crowds:Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations?
James Surowiecki
The Wisdom of Crowds:Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki takes about 6 hours 1 minute to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 1 minute
A weekend read
First published 2004. 328 pages, about 90,200 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 1 minute |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 1 minute |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 46 minutes |
The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant — better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future. Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world. The story is told of the first observations of this effect, through to anecdotes of the effect in modern economics and psychology. The book not heavy on statistics, and has prompted much research since its publication. The title is an allusion to the famous phrase, the "madness of crowds".
Subjects: Sociology, Common good, Business, Group decision making, Nonfiction, Consensus (Social sciences)
