The Wisdom of Crowds

Two books I would love to read:

1
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies and Nations (2004)
by James Surowiecki

"..[A book] about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.

The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton 's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts)." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds]

2
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
by Charles Mackay