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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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