Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe, by Greg Ip
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Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe, by Greg Ip
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How the very things we create to protect ourselves, like money market funds or anti-lock brakes, end up being the biggest threats to our safety and wellbeing. We have learned a staggering amount about human nature and disaster -- yet we keep having car crashes, floods, and financial crises. Partly this is because the success we have at making life safer enables us to take bigger risks. As our cities, transport systems, and financial markets become more interconnected and complex, so does the potential for catastrophe.How do we stay safe? Should we? What if our attempts are exposing us even more to the very risks we are avoiding? Would acceptance of danger make us more secure? Is there such a thing as foolproof? In FOOLPROOF, Greg Ip presents a macro theory of human nature and disaster that explains how we can keep ourselves safe in our increasingly dangerous world.
Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe, by Greg Ip - Amazon Sales Rank: #196627 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-13
- Released on: 2015-10-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.75" h x 1.25" w x 6.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe, by Greg Ip Review One of The Financial Times' best books of 2015 "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 Bankers Who Broke the World"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"This book is so much fun to read that it's easy to forget it's also very important. We live, now, in a world of constant risk--financial, geopolitical, meteorological. There are so many risks that many of us become either numb or blindly panicked or, somehow, both. Greg Ip has written a beautiful guide to thinking properly about the risks we face. It is a book that can make you feel empowered and optimistic, even as it details some of the scariest challenges we face. It's a book we need now, in a world that has become so complex that it's outrun our human brain's ability to make proper sense of the risks we face. But don't read it because it's important. Read it because it's fun, it has good narratives, some psychology, a bit of (easy, enjoyable) maths and a lot of clear, common sense. You will feel smarter and more capable and you will have tons of stories to tell your friends."―Adam Davidson, co-founder and co-host of Planet Money"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 of The Up Side of Down"[An] eye-opening book about risk-taking and crisis.... A provocative challenge to the tendency to elevate ideology over thoughtfulness."―Kirkus Reviews"Foolproof may change the way you think about some of the most important political, economic and social problems besetting us. It changed my thinking.... An elegant antidote to our myopia.... Foolproof could produce a national, and deserves to be the next, Tipping Point."―Ralph Benko, Forbes"A powerful and original book on a vital subject - read it!"―Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist Strikes Back"A thoughtful, entertaining read for those interested in the inner workings of global risk management."―Publishers Weekly"A short, sharp history of the United States' never-ending search for safety."―Charles Lane, Washington Post"Entertaining and provocative."―Lorien Kite, Financial Times
About the Author Greg Ip is an award-winning journalist and the Wall Street Journal's Chief Economics Commentator. He's spent two decades in financial and economic journalism, including eleven years at the Wall Street Journal and six years at The Economist. He appears frequently on television and radio, including National Public Radio, PBS, MSNBC, and CNBC. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
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Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful. Excellent, thought provoking, subtle, wide ranging By Jason Foolproof was excellent and much more subtle and thought provoking than its subtitle “Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe” would lead you to think. Instead of a retread of the well known Peltzman effect (the idea that innovations design to enhance safety just lead to greater risk taking without necessarily increasing safety) the book is actually a subtle and wide-ranging exploration of when it is true, when it is not, and its implications (e.g., seatbelt—the original Peltzman claim—actually don’t have the effect because people forget they are wearing them so don’t actually alter their behavior much, but antilock breaks are something you directly engage with while driving and lead to less safe driving). The wide-ranging aspect is a substantial amount of economics which is Greg Ip’s speciality, especially the recent financial and eurozone crises, but also safety in areas like food, floods, wildfires, automobiles, airplanes and professional football. Although Ip somewhat heroically tries to extract some lessons from all of this, the real strength of the book is tying together disparate topics and making you realize that there are no easy answers to any of these questions. That said, I personally find myself generally more sympathetic to what Ip calls the engineers (i.e., the people who try to make innovations to increase safety) rather than the ecologists (i.e., the people who worry about preserving the ecosystem as a whole without disturbances like new safety innovations). But overall an exciting read and thought provoking whether or not you agree with every part of it.
28 of 33 people found the following review helpful. Well researched, but shallow and disjointed By Athan Over the years Greg Ip had transitioned in my perception from financial journalist and follower of the latest economic news to something higher. His surveys of the US economy were well worth pulling out of the middle of the Economist and keeping as a reference.This book calls that judgement into question.During the crisis many people commented that we could draw an analogy between the work of forest fires for the health of the forest and recessions for the health of the economy. It was rather interesting.Greg Ip takes this analogy and turns it into a book.The book fails because analogies are just that: analogies. At some point they break down and at 280 pages this opus stretches them way past the point where that happens.So if you want to get a smattering of knowledge about the Peltzman Effect, ecological systems, forest fire management, the insurance business, the European lending crisis, the AIG debacle, levies on the Mississippi and in Holland, how to run an airline and the role of capital in banking mixed in with interviews only the phenomenal access Greg Ip and his ilk enjoy, then that’s cool, this book is for you.If it’s serious analysis you want, if you want to be able to hold a conversation with somebody who works in Immunology or Psychology or Forestry or Medicine or Insurance or Aviation or Banking or even Central Banking and do not want to come off as a dilettante who is merely parroting easy-to-digest platitudes, best you don’t read this at all.I can only comment on the stuff I understand well: So for example Germany is allegedly to blame for the fact that Greece has borrowed money it cannot pay back because it is the lender who makes it possible for the borrower to borrow. That’s plainly ridiculous. It’s a macroeconomic explanation for microeconomic ills which mainly affect Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain (and the north of Europe too, of course, but at least they can afford the sundry inefficiencies in their market structure) And it's, of course, an argument the financial press has put forward to justify the unjustifiable solutions that are currently being pursued, namely the official sector’s perpetuation of the rot in the south of Europe in the interest of avoiding overall change.Banks Greg Ip really really really does not understand. He thinks banks take depositors’ money and lend it to borrowers. That was true, dunno, five hundred years ago, and even then it was half true. It’s certainly not how M3 is generated, for example. With most of the money that goes around, both the deposit and the loan are generated in the banking system itself, of course. M3 arises when you come to the branch to ask for a loan, I approve it, I open you a bank account and stick the money in there (the bank's liability) in exchange for expecting you to pay me back one day with interest (the bank's asset). Then you buy stuff, your money moves to the bank account of whoever sold you the stuff, the bank’s asset remains your loan but the bank’s liability is in the bank account of the guy who sold you the stuff. No saver ever got involved in this, and that’s where 90% (actually more) of all money in the world comes from. This totally escapes Greg Ip’s simplistic discussion.This misunderstanding sets the scene for him to mis-prescribe capital as the ultimate solution. DUH, I say. Obviously, if for every loan I’ve given I hold an equal amount in shareholders’ capital my enterprise is safe. And if I hold no capital whatsoever I’m in trouble and so is the guy who has a bank account with me. So the answer is somewhere in the middle. Ergo, “capital” is the answer to a question nobody asked. The correct question is “how much capital?” This he does not even attempt to answer, other than to say we did not have enough during the crisis. You don’t say, Greg.If you want to read about the ills of portfolio insurance and the “fallacy of composition,” get a hold of Richard Bookstaber’s “A Demon of our Own Design,” a bloody good book on the subject. If actually explains how to deal with these things. If I’m not mistaken it’s also covered in Derman’s book “My life as a Quant,” but I read that some time ago, so I can’t vouch for it. Both books certainly spare you the tour of Yellowstone Park and Alexander Fleming’s petri dish, which I count as a positive.Let’s put it another way: it’s taken me two weeks to read this book. I found it to be the opposite of a book you can’t put down. I could not pick it up. It was like "what is he going to get half-right next?"Positives?I liked page 212, which explains rather well why hedging risk with zero-sum derivatives cannot protect the system as a whole: if you stand up in the stadium you can see the game better, but if everybody stands up then we’re back to where we started.I was also quite excited that, after pages of fawning at Goldman’s allegedly incredible risk management he dares to mention the fact that their protection against AIG failing had been bought from other banks like Citibank that would go down together with AIG and was thus a sham. Given how many interviews this will cost him from the ban on him that will ensue, that’s kinda cool.The overall feeling?The book was like being harangued at a party by an investment banker who knows everything because he’s rich.It had its moments, but it robbed me of reading time that won’t come back.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Great book! By Shaun Murphy I read this book cover to cover, and it really opened my eyes about how so many safety devices have to be carefully considered before using them. They can change our behavior in unexpected ways and then make us less safe. I learned a lot about football helmets and the airline industry. I haven't worn a bicycle helmet for years because of the unintended effects of those, but I had no idea that other safety devices had similar results. I thought Greg was very balanced though, he is evidence-based and doesn't trash all safety devices in his book.
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Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe, by Greg Ip
