Paul Ormerod

For me, the only thing of value in the book was in two lines in the introduction: "The book's content is firmly grounded in reality. Too much work in the social sciences, whether it is the dense mathematics of much of economics, or the tortuous prose of a great deal of sociology, is purely theoretical "

"...tortuous prose..." Spot on and so appropriate. The less precise or rigorous the proposition, the more cryptic the language used to describe it.

Mr. Ormerod was blind to his own tortuous prose. And the "things" that fail? Businesses. Economics. Nothing else. And nothing new to tell on that front, except perhaps a new packaging of a collection of historical data.… (meer)

The hardback copy of this I read had the subtitle "Evolution, Extinction and Economics" but it looks like the paperback got the subtitle swizzled to "...and how to avoid it". I probably wouldn't have picked it up with the latter title. I don't think either title is that descriptive though - it doesn't have that much to do with extinction or evolution and didn't really seem to explain that much about how to avoid failure. I will confess I was skim reading more the further I got into the book though so may very well have missed the essentials. Quite interesting but not terribly enthralling.… (meer)