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Nonetheless, it would be a false step to dispense with that expertise. No one seriously questions the need for heart surgeons or car mechanics, the need for specialist knowledge and experienced decision-making when repairing hearts or car parts. Human bodies and car engines are complex environments. But so too is the economic and financial system. It too needs specialist knowledge and experienced decision-makers. It does not follow from this, however, that expertise cannot be augmented or improved on by drawing on as wide a set of opinions as possible, expert and non-expert. Non-experts can provide a different lens on problems and solutions. This diversity of thought has been found to be especially useful in complex decision environments. Colloquially, that is why we call it “folk wisdom”. Back in 2004, James Surowiecki gave it another name – the “wisdom of crowds”. 27  There are now many examples of collective wisdom at work. th  The most celebrated is 19 century English statistician Francis Galton’s amazement at the accuracy of the average guesses about the weight of an ox among visitors to a county fair. Less celebrated (though, as it turns out, more accurate) was English magician Derren Brown’s attempt to predict the UK National Lottery results in 2009 using the wisdom of crowds. The wisdom of crowds is not magic. Subsequent research has found that it relies instead on two factors: diversity and deliberation. To take these in turn, the value of diversity in complex decision-making is fairly well-understood.