Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein has written a book whose brevity does little to indicate how much there is to take away from it. Infotopia is a short book which examines “how many minds produce knowledge” by comparing surveys, deliberation and markets. I feel a certain dishonesty in trying to summarize or critique such a cerebral book in a brief blog post, but I wanted to note some of his important points.

Sunstein’s work is an academic investigation of how the Internet allows projects like Wikipedia or Linux to succeed. Drawing on the scholarship of Friedrich Hayek and others, Sunstein notes the dispersed nature of knowledge. Starting with Hayek’s commentary that “Each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests…” Sunstein analyzes three methods of decision-making: surveys, deliberation and markets.

Each method has its strengths and weaknesses which the author is quick to point out; in fact, his honesty in these appraisals is what makes the book so refreshing: as a book jacket quote from Robert Maccoun points out, Sunstein is “neither a Utopian nor a Luddite…”

For example, the average of everyone’s estimation of how many jelly beans are in a closed container is often the most accurate guess, but in cases where the answer is not binary, this may fail. Or, in deliberation, the supposed bedrock of democratic institutions, we are apt to see failure due to social pressures or exclusion of minority voices. Finally, the value of markets (especially prediction markets) is extolled – after all, people tend to only put their money where their mouth is if they are confident – but qualified by noting bubbles, biases and manipulation.

Infotopia has a lot to digest but will be a great resource to those designing or questioning communities online and societies off.