This week, I've been reading The Wisdom of Crowds by New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki and it's absolutely brilliant.

The thesis of the book, is both stunning and exhilarating:

If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest, that group's decisions will, over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual, no matter how smart or well-informed he is. (The Wisdom of Crowds, p. XVII)

The classic example is to ask a crowd of people (say, at a state fair) to judge how many jelly beans are in a jar, or how much a cow weighs.  The average of all of the guesses from the crowd will tend to be more accurate than the guesses of even the best experts.

The Wisdom of Crowds doesn't just apply to guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar.  It also applies to things like stock markets, war planning, and public policy.  Over time, the collective judgment of large, diverse, independent, and decentralized groups will be wiser and more accurate than the opinions of experts.

The Wisdom of Crowds has a number of important ramifications for the blogosphere (namely it explains why the blogosphere is often smarter than the MSM).  

But today I want to focus on what The Wisdom of Crowds teaches us about the sorry state of the Republican Party.  

(more after the jump)

There's more...