The wisdom of crowds

In The Times yesterday, Matt Ridley argued that crowds are better at making decisions than experts or elites. It seems a fairly obvious thing to say, but this does rather depend on the level of knowledge of the crowd. My taxi driver this morning insisted that he supported only two charities – Help for Heroes and Guide Dogs for the Blind – because these were the only ones that weren’t run by the government. Help for Heroes, he insisted, was run by the armed forces rather than the government. Where to start? I’m not an argumentative person, so all I felt able to do was to make gentle nudges in a particular direction. Children in Need had raised so much money, he said, that everyone should now have clean water. It was, I pointed out, quite a big place. In any case that, for me, is the secret of an informed democracy – information; education. And unfortunately we seem to be moving towards a culture, particularly on the internet, that is making that more difficult. Extreme positions attract clicks (10 incredible things you won’t believe about foreign aid). People make their social media names not from reasonable assertion of the facts but from extreme positions. The standard of journalism is declining, whether from the mainstream media or the citizen alternative. Gimme the facts ma’am.

There has been much hand wringing in the UK following the election of Donald Trump as US president. At the time of writing, it’s still not clear exactly what he wants to do or whether he is going to be able to achieve it. What interests me, though, is the lack of any clear reporting of this during the election coverage. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the US election, but clearly Trump was a potentially frightening character and it seemed best to check him out. I looked at his campaign website and his Wikipedia page – hardly a forensic examination – but what was immediately apparent from both was that there was almost no substance behind what he was saying. There were a few headline policies (such as the wall and scrapping trade agreements) but very little detail on foreign policy, education, etc. And where there were policies, they were mostly random snippets rather than a coherent, thought-through approach. In addition there were a number of areas where his policies were vague, or even contradictory. This was never really picked up by the UK media. I know it’s hopelessly naïve of me, but could we not have had coverage of, say, a Trump policy announcement or, failing that, a report on the lack of policy. Instead, day after day of coverage focused on the latest revelations about what he’d said or done to women over the previous years. In other words, it focused on his character, rather than his policies. It seems to me that his character was rarely in doubt, whereas his policies frequently were. Also, it hardly helps an electorate to make an informed choice, if the information presented to them is in increasingly frantic soundbites.