Though not all readers will find this unconventional perspective on disorder particularly sage, Harford’s exploration is...
An award-winning economist celebrates the myriad advantages of clutter and disarray.
Economist and journalist Harford (The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, 2014, etc.) is an unabashed supporter of messiness, and his book, a cleareyed defense, explains and supports the many situations in which surrounding oneself with clutter and chaos can actually boost creativity, production, innovation, and even quality of life. It’s a tough sell—messiness has an inherent negative connotation attached to it, along with the stigma of laziness—but the author gets to work quickly, citing the careers of music icons David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Brian Eno, who all benefited from their “strange chaotic working process” (which involved drawing random, gnomic instructional cards) to produce several critically acclaimed studio albums in the late 1970s. Commercially successful novelist Michael Crichton has also been well-served by “project-juggling behavior,” as have certain workplace departmental team collaborations which, Harford writes, have found success with a “willingness to allow a degree of messiness into a tidy team.” This is especially evident in MIT’s hurriedly, haphazardly designed Building 20 and Steve Jobs’ serendipity-inspired office layouts at Pixar Studios. The whirling dervish of spontaneity also historically benefited Martin Luther King Jr.’s infamous, extemporaneous 1963 speech. Harford also examines Jeff Bezos’ slyly effective scramble to prevent Amazon from buckling beneath the dot-com bust and Donald Trump’s slapdash presidential bid. The author believes that there are dangers in rigidly overorganized, structured systems, as in the example of an out-of-practice airplane pilot whose overreliance on autopilot navigation proved disastrous. From diversified neighborhood communities and school playgrounds to messy desks and algorithmic dating websites, Harford presents the strategies of disorganization as unique and enlightening and convincingly offers reinforced encouragement to those who may find themselves “tempted by tidiness” to instead “embrace some mess instead.”
Though not all readers will find this unconventional perspective on disorder particularly sage, Harford’s exploration is entertaining and, despite the topic, well-constructed.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-479-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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