BOOK REVIEW: Will Hutton on <I>The Wisdom of Crowds</I>
- Details
- Written by Fred Moreau
The extraordinary good sense of people acting in crowds is the subject of a recently published volume, called "one of the most important books of the last year" by Will Hutton in Sunday's Observer. -- The theme of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday, May 2004; Anchor paperback, August 2005) is that crowds show extraordinarily good collective judgement. -- But that does not mean you should follow crowds, because there's a condition: crowds are "wise" only "as long as we each make our individual decision as far as possible independently and are not too much influenced by wanting to follow experts or second-guessing others. It is when we follow the crowd that it turns into an irrational mob, creating stock market bubbles or lynching the innocent," Hutton writes. "But when crowd decisions emerge of our own aggregated free will, they are astonishingly accurate and, when values are involved, decent." -- Also, interestingly, "To be wise . . . the crowd's judgment has to include everyone's -- the expert, the stupid, the allegedly commonsensical, the wild, the analytic, the hunch. It's by comprehending the universe of possible outcomes in all their diversity and then averaging them that the wisdom emerges." -- As Hutton points out, there are important lessons for government officials to learn from The Wisdom of Crowds....
BOOK REVIEW: Three recent books on French society reviewed
- Details
- Written by Mark Jensen
Since the Financial Times (UK) is known as "the Wall Street Journal of Europe," it is not surprising that this review of Olivier Duhamel's Des raisons du non (Paris: Seuil, June 2005) ('On the Reasons for the No') misses a key factor in the May 29 rejection of the European Constitution: a repudiation of the neoliberal instauration of corporate hegemony over French society that several clauses of the proposed constitutional treaty represented. -- The domination of French society by economic interests has never been part of the French democratic credo, and the effort to foist such a regime on France produced a remarkable mobilization of civil society against the constitution, one that prevailed in the face of nearly universal advocacy by French élites (those Thornhill describes as "the country's political, business, and media leadership") and demonstrated how out of touch they are with most French citizens. -- Thornhill's remarks on Rod Kedward's La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900 (London: Allen Lane, July 2005) are more sensible, and he notes how Kedward shows how quickly France can change. From this it follows that it is far too early to consign France to mediocrity, as those like Duhamel whose views were frustrated by the May 29 vote have been inclined to do. -- In describing Jacques Marseille's La guerre des deux France: Celle qui avance et celle qui freine (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, February 2005) ('The War of the Two Frances: The France That Goes Forward and the France That Hits the Brakes'), though, Thornhill reverts to neoliberal cheerleading, implicitly endorsing Marseille's view that "every French person must now choose whether to go on the offensive and join the 'France that works' or hunker down behind a new Maginot line in the 'France that moans.'" ...
BOOK REVIEW: Christopher Hitchens on pirates (<I>NYTBR</I>)
- Details
- Written by Mark Jensen
Weve had our differences with Christopher Hitchens. -- But say what you will, he writes more interesting book reviews than those other ex-Trotskyists turned neoconservatives. -- This review, on three recent books about American attitudes toward pirates, is particularly good, despite Hitchens's unpleasant need to snipe at his former comrades on the left. -- In shifting from the left to the right Hitchens thinks he has grasped something deep, but his insight is the same one intuited in 1832 by another remarkably self-centered figure moving in the opposite political direction than Hitchens but for the same reason (to be close to power), Alphonse de Lamartine: Raison, vérité et liberté, tout est là, après toutefois pouvoir, plus nécessaire encore" ('Reason, truth, and liberty are everything, but only after power, which is even more necessary'). -- That about sums about Hitchens's politics. -- Lamartine had much more literary talent and verbal dexterity than Hitchens, but that didn't keep him from becoming a literary hack, either....