Voting and the Wisdom of Crowds:

Several commenters on my post on the rationality of voting brought up James Surowiecki's interesting book, The Wisdom of Crowds. It so happens that I wrote a review of the Wisdom of Crowds last year, where I explained why his argument that large numbers of individually ignorant decision-makers can make seeemingly well-informed collective choices does not work well in the context of voting. For those interested, the review is available here.