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44 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
A Blueprint for Adapting
By John Chancellor
You may wonder when it comes to the need for adapting. Tim Harford, the author makes a very strong case for learning to adapt. “We face a difficult challenge: the more complex and elusive our difficultnesses are, the more effective trial and error becomes, relative to the alternatives. Yet it is an approach that runs counter to our instincts. The intention of this book is to provide an answer to that challenge.”
51 of 56 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting anecdotes, unconvincing thesis
By PriceTheory
As always, Tim Harford finds the most interesting economic exploration and explains it well. As I read Adapt, I was oftentimes inspired to go online and look up the economics he reports on. The division on evolved virtual creatures prompted me to visit YouTube and watch for myself how animal-like forms evolved through computer simulations. After reading when it comes to the unintended aftermaths of a great deal of alien help programs, I had to see what a Play Pump looks like and watch the consultations with teachers who preferent the old borehole pumps. Adapt is an splendid collection of quotes, stories, and exploration conclusions on innovation and economic evolution.
However, the book falls short in a few ways. First, even though Harford’s writing is in general clear, he employs numerous annoying rhetorical widgets that will have to have been edited out. One is that he repeatedly withholds the name of the person whose work he’s talking about until he has built up all the details of the story. Only once he’s laid out the exploration results does he disclose that the anonymous manager is a famous figure or an individual we met in the last chapter. It’s as if Harford isn’t convinced that the exploration will hold anyone’s attention, so he has to play games with the reader. Equally irksome is his tendency to repeat points again and again, reminding readers of things he brought up two pages back that no one could have forgotten.
The chapter on the financial crisis was likewise a disappointment. It devolved into boring jargon and obscure terms for dissimilar loans and contracts. Maybe it’s not possible to make subprime mortgages entertaining, and I don’t recognise if any other writer could have done a better job. But the book would have been more gratifying without that tedious interlude.
But the main drawback is that Harford’s thesis that economic progression parallels evolution in the natural world is not to a complete degree produced or defended. Certainly, economic progression is like evolution in that bad productions vanish and good technology, like good genes, is passed along. Harford’s assertion that isolation is a necessary precondition of creative thinking seems less persuasive. He gives examples from evolutionary biology in which populations adapted differently because they were separated by physical barriers. Harford then offers the example of researchers who moved out to Utah or Arizona to get some space as proof that humane innovators must be also isolated. But is that actually unfeigned in the world of humane ideas? I’m not convinced. Virtually all innovators of the last century had numerous kind of intellectual peer group, either through a university or social circle. And progressed communications enable researchers in Utah to keep abreast of the latest ideas and theories. They’re not separated intellectually from their peers the way guppies in dissimilar ponds are disunited physically. Furthermore, Harford does not wholly explain what procedure in the economy corresponds to sexual reproduction in the natural world. How do good ideas disseminate if they’re not identified by a manager from the top? Harford alludes to imitation by other economic actors, but doesn’t show how or why this occurs.
Adapt is suitable reading as a starting-point for investigating economic exploration on innovation, but it is model of economic development as a corollary to biological evolution is not totally satisfactory.
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Tim Harford’s “Adapt” a study of failure, reward.
By Barb Caffrey
Tim Harford’s “Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure” is a book when it comes to economic case study, written in an engaging, fast-moving way but without losing any of it is erudition. Harford discusses a good deal of dissimilar types of business models, including the United States Army (the chapter with regards to how the Army necessitated to adapt, pronto, in the Middle East is must-read stuff), respective scientific endeavors (including one gentleman who studied mouse genetics, who succeeded by refusing to adapt, realizing that the world would adjust to him, not the reverse), and all sorts of economic pursuits. And in all of them, one thing is continuous: we fail. Again, and again, and again. And a smart manager, or businessman, or Army Captain on up, realizes this and either learns from his faults in order to succeed, or he’ll fail over, and over, and over again.
The trick of life, Harford says, is to learn from your mistakes. This is such a truism that you’d not think any individual could hang a book around it except a feel-good psychologist — but Harford is an economist (one of his other books is called “The Undercover Economist”) and he looks at things more scientifically and in a rational manner than I’d expected when I’d ordered this book.
I cherished the perceptivenesses being given here in “Adapt” incisively because Harford used case studies that were provable and relevant. It added a outstanding deal to the readability of this book by covering topical subjects (including the TransOcean fiasco which poured billions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico) in an entertaining, fast-moving, yet brilliant way . . . all I may say is bravo to Harford, and bravissimo to his editor.
A shade under five stars (rounded up for Amazon’s purposes), highly commended for any individual who wants to grasp the economy a little better — or better yet, wants to figure out how to learn from his own errors in order to succeed the next time out.
Barb Caffrey
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