Fluke - Brian Klaas ****

On the whole, popular science books tell us about what science and scientists have achieved. Fluke is very different in this respect - in it, social scientist and professor of global politics Brian Klaas tells us about what the social sciences have failed to achieve, and why.

Perhaps the most familiar aspects of this are in introducing the reader to the implications of chaos theory and of complexity, plus the fall out of the replication crisis that has rendered many older (and quite a few new) social science studies useless. Using plenty of engaging stories (including the fact that his own existence is the outcome, amongst other things, of a horrific killing) Klaas builds a picture of just how many small inputs come together to make anything happen in the complex system of human society.

The implication of this is that is practically impossible to usefully predict the future in the social sciences (so much for Asimov's psychohistory) - in fact, hardly any social science (which includes economics) can say much that's useful about the future. Klaas also points out, for instance, how many economic forecasts from established bodies are wrong (pretty well all of them).

Another fascinating story is how a unique study looked into how immigration influenced voters' support of 'the social safety net'. The same set of data was given to 76 research teams, who weren't allowed to communicate. Each used their own methods, employing a total of 1,253 mathematical models. Just over half found no link at all - the rest were evenly split between a positive and a negative effect. All from exactly the same data.

The one negative I found in reading this was that, though the stories were excellent, I frequently felt 'And...?' - when the main message is that we can't deduce anything much scientifically about human behaviour because the topic is pretty well impossible to usefully quantify, the question kept coming up to me of 'What's the point of this?' In his final chapter, Klaas pulls it all together by effectively encouraging us to embrace the chaos - to accept that things are like this and we should enjoy it, rather than bewail it.

One big question that was left unanswered was to ask 'If the topics of social science are so impossible to effectively study in any quantifiable fashion, why bother at all? Why do we fund all this research?' Despite this, though, I found the book interesting and thought provoking.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Search This Blog