Messy
by Tim
Harford is a mess, letting you decide whether the subtitle, The Power of
Disorder to Transform our Lives, is good or evil. The book is a disordered
collection of research and anecdotes, occasionally contradictory and often
cherry-picked. The book takes its own advice: “rapid movement and bold
independent action…creating more chaos...”
The short
book, padded with twenty pages of notes, runs amok through popular social
science, picking interesting studies and conjectures. What do Darwin, Erdos,
Jobs, MLK, Bezos, Schwarzenegger, and Trump all have in common? The answer?
Harford was able to spin an interesting yarn out of an incident in their life
and use the word “messy” in the process. Sometimes messy is a conscious strategy,
other times it is a challenging environment. Sometimes it is a force for good,
other times it supports the dark side.
Messy
explains the success of Rommel, Bezos, and Trump. It also forecasts the failure
of automation and AI. As an anthology, the collection of vignettes is
interesting, if not overly long. Most have appeared in many other places,
making much of the book repetitive and derivative.
As a book
about Messy,The Power of Disorder to Transform our Lives, it succeeds on a meta-level, demonstrating the “Power
of Disorder” and leaving the reader to decide if they love or loathe the author’s
chaos. I prefer my non-fiction to be more orderly.
A wild
adventure through the science and mythology of human behavior. Caveat emptor.
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