COMMENTARY: America continues to rely on the collective wisdom of the people

One of the joys of living in flyover country is the annual state fair. It is a mix of traveling circus, amusement park, unbelievable food, live entertainment and serious competitions.

You see children (and adults) vying for prizes for raising livestock. You can watch everything from barrel racing to sheep shearing. And you can not only see the biggest watermelon but also participate in watermelon seed-spitting contests, not to mention other contests and games. And don’t forget the famous butter cow — that is, a life-size cow carved out of butter — if you’re fortunate enough to attend the Iowa State Fair.

One of my favorite stops at a state fair is the animal barn. Go there, and I promise you’ll see a crowd around one pen in particular: the prize-winning “largest hog.” Winning the largest hog competition often requires a beast in excess of 1,200 pounds. The record holder, according to Guinness World Records, was a pig named Big Bill, who weighed more than 2,550 pounds.

In some fairs, however, the hog competition includes the spectators, as well as the hogs. The challenge is to “guess the weight.”

You would think that among state fair spectators and participants, there would be quite a few ringers — hog farmers in particular — when it comes to guessing the weight of a gargantuan hog. There are, but they’re not always the winners.

In his 2004 book “The Wisdom of the Crowds” — subtitled “Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations” — James Surowiecki applied the wisdom of crowds to questions that go way beyond guessing porcine weight.

For instance, the “crowds” he studied were able to identify the cause of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster far faster than the “experts.” And the wisdom of the crowd also explains why stock index funds generally outperform funds run by professional money managers over time.

This phenomenon also forms one of the principal arguments for democracy: Collective decisions are generally better than those made by simply handing power over to the (usually self-selected) “most qualified.”

This principle was famously articulated by the legendary journalist and author William F. Buckley Jr. when he quipped, “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.”

Psychologist Barry Schwartz, in the book “Paradox of Choice,” reminds us that making choices is not always pleasant. There is a cost, he wrote, to things such as having to pick among 20 brands of ketchup in the typical U.S. supermarket. Making choices takes time and energy, and having to decide everything all the time can be a real burden.

Today, we are seeing both phenomena in action. As the Democratic and Republican parties have become more dogmatic, a growing number of Americans are saying, “A plague on both your houses.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters. In 2024, 26 percent of voters disliked both candidates. Choosing is especially unsatisfying when you don’t like either option.

The genius of the American system of government is that we have multiple checks on those in power. If the parties don’t give us candidates we like, we rotate the parties.

Since Jimmy Carter, we have had a single-party control the presidency and both houses of Congress in consecutive two-year terms only once (with George W. Bush following 9/11). While Republicans have ridden a wave of euphoria over the past year, the recent off-year elections suggest the American people may be preparing to return to divided government in Washington.

Combined with constitutional limitations on the government’s overall powers and the president’s specific powers — and court decisions reaffirming those limitations — this is how the American system is supposed to work. It is messy by design and requires the frequent intervention of the people.

The genius of the Founders was to entrust our freedom to the collective wisdom of the people.

Frederic J. Fransen is the president of Ameritas College Huntington (W.Va.) and CEO of Certell Inc. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.