Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Tim Harford, "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure", Hachette Digital, 2011. In my review of The Undercover Economist  and The Undercover Economist Strikes Back , I noted that there is also a third Tim Harford book on Conceptually's bookshelf . Indeed, that book is Adapt  -- a book about bottom-up trial-and-error approaches to solving complex problems. For an economist who believes in the power of markets, this seems like a logical literary foray. ( Recall that, for economists L. von Mises and F. Hayek, the market's price system functions as a decentralized "economic calculator".) However, Adapt is about much more than economics; it touches on a diverse range of issues including terrorism, climate change, innovation, evolution, nuclear accidents, and even art. In the first of eight chapters, the author talks about how the complexity of the modern world can make it hard to solve problems, even for leaders and experts. Even the l...

Book Review: Tim Harford, "The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why The Rich Are Rich, The Poor Are Poor -- And Why You Can Never Buy A Decent Used Car!", Oxford University Press, 2006. ~and~ Tim Harford, "The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run -- Or Ruin -- An Economy", Riverhead Books, 2014. The last time on my blog that I reviewed two books together was more than a year ago, when I wrote " Of Animals and Machines ". Both of those books ( Animal Spirits  and The Second Machine Age ) were about economics; this time, both books are about economics again -- but by one author. Tim Harford is an economist, journalist, TED speaker , and author of several books. His first book, The Undercover Economist , is probably his most famous. The sequel, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back , arrived almost a decade later. The main difference between these books is that the former focused more on microeconomics, whereas the latter focused more on macroec...