Matt Ridley on collective intelligence

Civilization flourishes not because of individual genius but because we combine the minds of billions of humans into a collective intelligence that far exceeds anyone's abilities.  No one knows how to make a pencil or a PC.  It takes huge numbers of us to do so.  This is why democracy trumps dictatorship and market solutions trump government solutions.  I really does take a (global) village.  More here.

That's why, as Friedrich Hayek observed, central planning never worked: the cleverest person is no match for the collective brain at working out how to distribute consumer goods. The idea of bottom-up collective intelligence, which Adam Smith understood and Charles Darwin echoed, and which Hayek expounded in his remarkable essay "The use of knowledge in society", is one idea I wish everybody had in their cognitive toolkit.