More and more, it seems, we in the progressive movement are bumping heads against what appear to be more-or-less insane corporate policies which are not only harmful to society at large, not only unprofitable, but more or less the conventional wisdom within an entire industry.  There are a couple of examples that come to mind immediately: the consensus opinion among cable news channels that talk shows should be predominantly conservative or right-center, and the consensus opinion in big business that unionization is bad and should be thwarted, even using illegal means.

These are just a couple of examples, but even these two have devestating consequences for the progressive movement and the country as a whole.  The conservative domination of cable news is part of the reason we're bogged down in Iraq, and it's a very powerful echo chamber that tends to silence the progressive voices in our party, and favors Republican and conservative Democratic candidates.  Meanwhile, the relentless union-busting ethos in corporate America is wreaking havoc on the economy, because it sharply exaggerates economic inequality; at the same time, it deflates the idea of solidarity in the workplace, which is one of the pillars of the progressive movement.

I became very curious about these phenomena when I read Jeff Cohen's book, Cable News Confidential.  The book provides incredible detail on the atmosphere at MSNBC in the months leading up to the war in Iraq, and some of the reasoning behind the managerial decisions which led to the failure of Donohue on MSNBC, and the increasingly shrill pro-war views expressed on all three cable news channels.  What's interesting is that, from Cohen's vantage point, these decisions were remarkably boneheaded, and appeared to defy simple business reasoning.  MSNBC was not trying to find a way to attract more viewers than Fox News Channel, it was simply trying to imitate Fox.  MSNBC did not shrewdly ascertain that Fox's success was based on its cultivation of a niche audience, and that the secret to success in cable news was finding a different niche and attracting that niche in novel ways; instead, it obtusely assumed that cable news consumers were emphaticaly right-leaning, and so it attempted to mimic Fox rather than provide an alternative.  CNN, which should have naturally been the beneficiary of MSNBC's bumbling inability to compete with Fox, instead appears to have done much the same.

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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...