Saturday, June 10, 2023
No Result
View All Result
  • Media
Support Us
Macdonald-Laurier Institute
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy Program
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • Economic policy
      • Health Care
      • Innovation
      • Justice
      • Social issues
      • Telecoms
    • Energy Policy Program
      • Energy
      • Environment
    • Foreign Policy Program
      • Foreign Affairs
      • National Defence
      • National Security
    • Indigenous Affairs Program
  • Projects
    • The Great Energy Crisis
    • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
    • Dragon at the Door
    • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
    • The Transatlantic Program
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
    • Competition Policy in Canada
    • Speak for Ourselves
    • Justice Report Card
    • COVID Misery Index
      • Provincial COVID Misery Index
      • Beyond Lockdown
      • COVID and after: A mandate for recovery
    • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
      • Aboriginal Canada and Natural Resources
    • Past Projects
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
      • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
      • Straight Talk
      • Labour Market Report
      • Leading Economic Indicator
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Libraries
    • Inside Policy Magazine
      • Inside Policy Online
      • Inside Policy Back Issues
    • Papers
    • Commentary
    • Columns
    • Books
    • Video
    • Podcasts
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy Program
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • Economic policy
      • Health Care
      • Innovation
      • Justice
      • Social issues
      • Telecoms
    • Energy Policy Program
      • Energy
      • Environment
    • Foreign Policy Program
      • Foreign Affairs
      • National Defence
      • National Security
    • Indigenous Affairs Program
  • Projects
    • The Great Energy Crisis
    • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
    • Dragon at the Door
    • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
    • The Transatlantic Program
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
    • Competition Policy in Canada
    • Speak for Ourselves
    • Justice Report Card
    • COVID Misery Index
      • Provincial COVID Misery Index
      • Beyond Lockdown
      • COVID and after: A mandate for recovery
    • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
      • Aboriginal Canada and Natural Resources
    • Past Projects
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
      • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
      • Straight Talk
      • Labour Market Report
      • Leading Economic Indicator
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Libraries
    • Inside Policy Magazine
      • Inside Policy Online
      • Inside Policy Back Issues
    • Papers
    • Commentary
    • Columns
    • Books
    • Video
    • Podcasts
No Result
View All Result
Macdonald-Laurier Institute

The consulting challenge

July 21, 2010
in Latest News
Reading Time: 2 mins read
A A

News reaches me that the British government has teamed up with Facebook on the “largest public engagement project” ever by a British government, the Spending Challenge seeking ideas from the 26 million Britons on Facebook on taming the deficit (through Facebook’s Democracy UK page). It sure sounds good… but it’s not.
The determination of governments to appear to be listening to the public is understandable. But if you calculate that giving one minute of attention to 26 million different people would require nearly 50 years you can see that it is not a technically doable consultation project.

It is also poorly designed for a quite different reason. James Surowiecki, in his fascinating book The Wisdom of Crowds, demonstrates that much elite disdain for the opinions of ordinary people is profoundly misplaced. Surowiecki starts with a discovery by a professor inclined toward eugenics and contemptuous of the masses, that when a crowd at a fair bought tickets with a prize for estimating the butchered and dressed weight of an ox present in a live state, the average of their guesses was amazingly close to the final figure even though many of the individual entries was wildly wrong. He proceeds to discuss a great deal of subsequent research suggesting that the aggregate of a group of guesses about things like, for instance, the number of marbles in a large jar is not only likely to be very good, it’s often better than all but a handful of the individual guesses.

Surowiecki’s conclusion is not that mobs are smarter than philosophers. It’s that the common sense of the common people taken in aggregate is statistically far more accurate than any other method. Which rather vindicates democracy but in a special way and of a particular sort.

For Surowiecki further demonstrates that this sort of aggregation of lay opinions is very good at a structured process of choosing between alternatives (including in the original case of the ox, since anyone capable of purchasing a ticket knew its weight had to be a particular number and their job was just to figure out which one). It is not nearly as valuable in determining alternatives. That is why populism leads to instability while first-past-the-post is, at least, what Churchill said democracy was.

What the British government ought to be doing, therefore, is having experts devise alternatives that are not conspicuously insane or internally contradictory, and then asking the public to choose between them. Also known as developing platforms then having an election. For the rest, if you could spend 50 years sorting through 26 million brief Facebook comments you’d get about what it sounds like: a half century older, deeper in debt, and bonkers.

Previous Post

Fighter jets…why the surprise?

Next Post

Montreal launch of The Canadian Century

Related Posts

Canada’s defence policy needs to focus on the war we are already fighting: Ann Fitz-Gerald and Jason Donville for Inside Policy
Inside Policy

Canada’s defence policy needs to focus on the war we are already fighting: Ann Fitz-Gerald and Jason Donville for Inside Policy

June 9, 2023
Liberals’ war on cars harms low-income Canadians: Jerome Gessaroli in the National Post
Columns

Liberals’ war on cars harms low-income Canadians: Jerome Gessaroli in the National Post

June 9, 2023
‘ASEAN centrality’ and the emerging great power competition: K. Yhome for the Observer Research Foundation
Columns

China should heed the concerns of its neighbors: Stephen Nagy in the Japan Times

June 8, 2023
Next Post
Montreal launch of The Canadian Century

Montreal launch of The Canadian Century

Newsletter Signup

Follow us on

Macdonald-Laurier Institute

323 Chapel Street, Suite #300
Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 7Z2 Canada

613.482.8327

info@macdonaldlaurier.ca
MLI directory

Support Us

Support the Macdonald-Laurier Institute to help ensure that Canada is one of the best governed countries in the world. Click below to learn more or become a sponsor.

Support Us

  • Inside Policy Magazine
  • Annual Reports
  • Jobs
  • Privacy Policy

© 2021 Macdonald-Laurier Institute. All Rights reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy Program
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • Economic policy
      • Health Care
      • Innovation
      • Justice
      • Social issues
      • Telecoms
    • Energy Policy Program
      • Energy
      • Environment
    • Foreign Policy Program
      • Foreign Affairs
      • National Defence
      • National Security
    • Indigenous Affairs Program
  • Projects
    • The Great Energy Crisis
    • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
    • Dragon at the Door
    • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
    • The Transatlantic Program
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
    • Competition Policy in Canada
    • Speak for Ourselves
    • Justice Report Card
    • COVID Misery Index
      • Provincial COVID Misery Index
      • Beyond Lockdown
      • COVID and after: A mandate for recovery
    • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
      • Aboriginal Canada and Natural Resources
    • Past Projects
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
      • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
      • Straight Talk
      • Labour Market Report
      • Leading Economic Indicator
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Libraries
    • Inside Policy Magazine
      • Inside Policy Online
      • Inside Policy Back Issues
    • Papers
    • Commentary
    • Columns
    • Books
    • Video
    • Podcasts

© 2021 Macdonald-Laurier Institute. All Rights reserved.

IDEAS CHANGE THE WORLD!Have the latest Canadian thought leadership delivered straight to your inbox.
First Name
Last Name
Email address

No thanks, I’m not interested.