He was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he wrote a regular column on business and finance called "The Financial Page".

He is a 1984 graduate of Choate Rosemary Hall and a 1988 alumnus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.

Surowiecki's writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Motley Fool, Foreign Affairs, Artforum, Wired, MIT Technology Review, and Slate.

Before joining The New Yorker, he wrote “The Bottom Line” column for New York magazine and was a contributing editor at Fortune.

In an article in the Huffington Post in November 2013, Internet entrepreneur and researcher Neil Seeman drew on social media trends over the time since the publication of The Wisdom of Crowds to observe that Mr. Surowiecki had written his observations about collective intelligence "prior to the proliferation of Facebook and Twitter and 'social filtering'; today, online, we increasingly do not reach any wisdom of any independently-minded crowds.