Greg Ip. (2015). Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe. Little, Brown and Company.

Greg Ip. 2015. Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe. Little, Brown and Company.

Greg Ip, Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe. Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

Greg Ip. Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe. Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

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   • fileAs: Ip, Greg
   • bioText: 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.
   • name: Greg Ip

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title

Foolproof

fullDescription

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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and To Sell Is Human
   • content: 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.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
   • content: 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.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Sebastian Mallaby, author of More Money Than God
   • content: 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.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Adam Davidson, co-founder and co-host of Planet Money
   • content: 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.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Megan McArdle, author of The Up Side of Down
   • content: 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.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: [An] eye-opening book about risk-taking and crisis.... A provocative challenge to the tendency to elevate ideology over thoughtfulness.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Ralph Benko, Forbes
   • content: 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.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist Strikes Back
   • content: A powerful and original book on a vital subject - read it!
9. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: A thoughtful, entertaining read for those interested in the inner workings of global risk management.
10. • premium: False
    • source: Charles Lane, Washington Post
    • content: A short, sharp history of the United States' never-ending search for safety.
11. • premium: False
    • source: Lorien Kite, Financial Times
    • content: Entertaining and provocative.
12. • premium: False
    • source: Jared Bernstein, On the Economy
    • content: Not just one of the more informative books on the financial crisis, but one of the more entertaining and readable ones.
13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 17, 2015
      Ip, chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal, takes on the well-intentioned but flawed impulse to completely safeguard oneself from disaster. In his opinion, the universal urges to achieve success and seek safety often lead to failure and danger. When peril is recent or vivid in memory, people are more cautious: for example, Wall Street brokers who have not gone through a crash are likely to take more risks, and often return better results, than those who have. But the longer the time between one danger and the next, the less urgent the drive for caution. Ip ties many of the catastrophes of the last 10 years to this phenomenon and suggests that the world’s increasingly interconnected transport, finances, and communications also have increased risks. He sees the impulse to “make things bigger and more complicated” as one that conflicts with the urge to ensure safety. The best solution would be a happy medium between safety and risk, but humans have consistently failed to find this balance. Tackling subjects that include forest fires, Paul Volcker’s economics, and savings vs. debt, Ip entwines economics and psychology to show how to “maximize the units of innovation we get per unit of instability.” This is a thoughtful, entertaining read for those interested in the inner workings of global risk management.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 1, 2015
      Societies and economies "are not inherently stable," writes Wall Street Journal chief economics commentator Ip (The Little Book of Economics: How the Economy Works in the Real World, 2010) in this eye-opening book about risk-taking and crisis. The author contends that our successful quest for safety and stability is constantly undermined by increased risk-taking and greater dangers, and he believes "we are going to have to re-examine" the premises as well as their results. Miami's growth as a population center, like the buildup of the Jersey shore, has increased the dangers associated with storms, but governments continue to justify their existence and claim to deliver both economic and political stability. Ip insists that as progress occurs, there is also "an equally irrepressible drive to make things bigger and more complicated." In addition to discussing finance and economics, the author references natural disasters and efforts to make what we do safer-e.g., effects of anti-lock brakes and hard helmets for footballers. For him, there is a trade-off between the benefits and their unintended consequences, and the author discerns a pattern: the safer we feel at any time, the closer we may be to greater risk and danger (see how the widespread use of antibiotics has reduced their effectiveness). Ip argues for a nonideological approach employing prudence and carefulness, and he explains what he identifies as a dichotomy between "engineers" and "ecologists." Engineers believe man will find solutions to any problem. Ecologists, like those who thought forest fires should be allowed to burn themselves out, think things should be left alone. Ip locates similar tensions within government, economics, and finance. He wisely advocates taking "the best of both" while exercising restraint "and not ask[ing] too much of them." A provocative challenge to the tendency to elevate ideology over thoughtfulness. The author amply shows how "stability is blissful, but it may also be illusory, hiding the buildup of hidden risks or nurturing behavior that will bring the stability to an end."

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

32

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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.

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Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe

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Little, Brown and Company

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