Over the past century, we have learned a staggering amount about human nature and how to deal with disaster - yet we keep having car crashes, floods and financial crises. Why is this so? The answer is partly that our desire to make life safer inevitably comes into conflict with the equally irrepressible desire to make things bigger and more complicated. It is our nature to safeguard our world - and yet sometimes, more often than we realise, the very things we create to protect ourselves, end up being the things that threaten our safety and well-being. Take for example anti-locking braking systems on cars - designed to stop us skidding, they actually encourage us to drive faster. Or the 2008 financial crisis - did the steps taken to make the economy more stable in the preceding years encourage behaviour that made a new, devastating crisis inevitable? Experience shows us that we can never build a completely foolproof system because humans will always find a way to muck it up. But we can learn from past mistakes and understand that in order to thrive, we must not take the reckless path or the path that seems safest, but a measure of something in between.
In engaging stories and practical takeaways Foolproof shows us how to stop trying to make the world unbreakable, and take advantage of risk.
About the Author
Greg Ip is the chief columnist on economics for the Wall Street Journal, before which he was the U.S. Economics Editor for The Economist, where he covered the economy, financial markets, and monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy. In 2002 Ip was part of a team from the Wall Street Journal Staff who shared a Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for covering the September 11 attacks. He is the author of The Little Book of Economics.
Industry Reviews
A powerful and original book on a vital subject - read it! Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist Strikes Back Compelling Financial Times In this incisive and richly reported book, Greg Ip forces us to rethink our assumptions about risk. He shows that progress might depend on less safety, not more - and that stability can often be destabilizing. FOOLPROOF is the rare book you'll be thinking about long after you've turned the final page. Daniel H. Pink, author of DRIVE and TO SELL IS HUMAN Drawing on a fascinating range of stories about forest fires and flood control, football helmets and anti-lock brakes, bank runs and epidemics, Foolproof is about the unintended and often very surprising consequences of our attempts to protect ourselves from disasters. Illuminating and entertaining, this book will change the way you think about the world of risk. Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lords of Finance The safer you are, the more you are at risk; crises are born of success as much as failure. Surveying a century of struggles to fend off catastrophe, from financial panic to forest fires, Greg Ip explores these paradoxes deftly, cementing his position as a leading observer of the modern economy-and of the human condition. Sebastian Mallaby, author of More Money Than God It has been said that the problem with making things idiot-proof is that someone will just build a better idiot. Greg Ip's new book shows us just how that happens, from anti-lock brakes to the gold standard, to the financial crisis we are still reckoning with today. Deftly written and filled with lucid explanations of complex topics, this is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why seemingly safe territory so often turns out to be dangerous quicksand. Megan McArdle, author, The Up Side of Down
