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Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: extinction size, stress tolerance level, bottom axis, United States, Nobel Prize, Second World War (more...)
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Businesses collapse just as surely as people do, yet economics textbooks and financial reporters stubbornly concentrate on success rather than failure. Ormerod (Butterfly Economics) argues this outlook is fundamentally flawed; failure, he says, is "the distinguishing feature of corporate life," and he uses it to link economic models with models of biological evolution, which he presents as a string of extinctions rather than survival of the fittest. Despite this parallel, his focus is on economic theory and what he sees as its inadequate accounting of uncertainty (defined as the impossibility of knowing how policies or business strategies will work) and how it breeds failure. He writes about complex concepts such as power-law behavior, game theory and bounded rationality, but makes them accessible to the lay reader with lengthy but readable explanations that forsake jargon for contemporary cultural references. (Though people who are already familiar with the debates he brings up will doubtless get more out of the book) Yet for all his persuasive examples, the book never crystallizes into a whole, so while readers may find many parts provocative, they are likely to finish it still lacking a complete understanding of failure as Ormerod sees it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.


From Booklist

Economist Ormerod addresses "what is probably the most fundamental feature of both biological and human social and economic systems: failure. Species fail and become extinct, brands fail, companies fail, public policies fail." It is fortunate that everything does not fail at once. With an emphasis on reality and not theory, he offers three themes: a documentation of failure, the subtle patterns he finds in the apparent disorder of failure, and the causes of failure. Ormerod concludes that innovation is the guiding principle that companies use to try to overcome the uncertainty surrounding their decisions. Management responds with constant action, testing new ideas, new brands, and new products because they cannot know with absolute certainty why an individual brand fails, and almost all brands eventually fail. The focus on innovation, developing new strategies for individual survival, is also important for consumers and citizens. This is challenging reading and not recommended for the casual reader. Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Wiley; New edition edition (February 26, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0470089199
  • ISBN-13: 978-0470089194
  • Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #513,579 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Paul Ormerod
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
extinction size, stress tolerance level, bottom axis, conventional economic theory
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, Nobel Prize, Second World War, First World War, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, General Motors, Vernon Smith, Bill Gates, European Union, Karl Marx, Western Europe, World Bank, Bob Lutz, Bobby Fischer, Industrial Revolution, John Nash, Long-Term Capital Management, New Coke, San Diego, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Potter
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Stimulating? Yes; Analytically Defensible? Poor, June 26, 2006
This review is from: Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (Hardcover)
Paul Ormerod's "Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics," begins with the observation that failure is everywhere but is not the subject of standard analysis by the economics profession. Since the advent of the modern corporation, 22% of the top 100 companies at any given time drop from the elite rankings in the next decade, 10% of all companies fail each year (granted, mostly the newbies), and 50% of globally successful companies go extinct within the lifetime of a modern human. Why?

Ormerod brings a journalist's and economic historian's perspective to the question. He snorts at general equilibrium theory as being fundamentally at odds with how the real economy works. Standard supply curves? NO. Demand curves? NO. Setting price at marginal costs? NO. Perfect competition? NO. Perfect information? NO. Eventually rising marginal costs with greater production? RARELY.

I'm not surprised that professional economists would find this book lacking. Yet for most of us that have only taken Economics 101 or mostly get our economics from pop economists on news and business programs, Ormerod raises important questions and brings forth important ideas. There is indeed much that the conventional economics community has gotten wrong or has been too simplistic about. This book is a very good re-entry into economics if you have been away for a while.

Ormerod's major thesis -- and what caught my eye in getting the book in the first place -- is that there are many parallels between biological evolution and the behavior and extinction of firms. For this, Ormerod especially points to both systems as being characterized by much uncertainty and complexity. No argument there.

In knocking down the pins of conventional textbook answers, Ormerod covers topics such as game theory, bounded rationality, probablity theory and power laws, invoking names and characters such as Von Neumann, Hayek, Stiglitz and others along the way. His thesis also allows him to explore the question of exogenous and endogenous causes with some freshness.

Strangely, though, he is virtually silent on the real commonality between economic and biological systems -- namely the central importance of information -- and gets into a very strange and indefensible analysis of punctuated equilibria and extinctions for species spanning 550 million years in comparison to visual correlations that create an "immediate impression of similarity" with graphs of firm extinctions over the past 83 years. As Ormerod states, "The relationship that describes the connection between the frequency and size of extinctions in biological species is the same as that which describes the extinctions of companies. The timescales differ dramatically, but frequency and size are connected identically in both."

Hogwash.

Ormerod gravely mis-matches samples, causality and power curves. Indeed, similar power curves can be constructed for Web site popularity or term frequencies in the English language (among many others), which surely have nothing to do with "truths" about the extinctions of economic firms. Also, given Ormerod's thesis, he could have gotten some additional interesting mileage from Iansiti and Levien's business ecosystem theory of The Keystone Advantage.

There is certainly insight that uncertainty makes it difficult to foolproof against the future and is one reason why things fail, also certainly compounded by complexity. I also think Ormerod is able to make a pretty good case for how acquiring knowledge can help buffer against these factors.

So, I give this book 5 stars for readability and provoking thought; indeed, it has gotten me to get re-acquainted with recent economics literature. But I can only give it 1 to 2 stars for its logical side due to its mis-labored analogies and poor analysis. BTW, for an intro to more serious discussions about the relationships of evolution and economics, see writers such as Nelson and Winter, Galor, Mokyr, or Ziman, among others, or the listings at IDEAS: Papers on Economics and Evolution from the Max Planck Institute.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars More an attack on economics than a new economics, January 2, 2007
By therosen "therosen" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
  
This review is from: Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (Hardcover)
Paul Oremerod bills the book as a theory for why everything fails. This high concept book (aimed at the audience of similar high concept books like Blink and Freakonomics) unfortunately fails to deliver on it's promise of a grand unifying theme. What is presented is an attack on classical economics. Well deserved, and well delivered from an insider in the profession, but not a coherent explanation of why things don't work.

Whining aside, the book won't kill you, it's an easy read, and you'll learn something (quite a bit!) from it. For that, it does deserve a spot on my bookshelf.
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25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Mediocre - Does Not Deliver on Its Promise, July 4, 2006
This review is from: Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (Hardcover)
I bought this book hoping for insight into "why most things fail." What I got was a rambling argument grounded primarily on the similarity of the frequency distributions of business failure and biological failures (extinctions). Frankly, the relationship hardly strikes me as logically necessary, and the relation could well be spurious (or coincidental). But I'm no PhD and didn't give it a lot of thought, so I could well be wrong.

What I am certain of is that the book offered little else, no corrolaries, certainly no explanation of the reasons "why most things fail," and no other practical insights or knowledge.

Bottom line, wait for the book's appearance in the discount bin before buying.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and Witty
Most things fail - including social policies - because of complexity and uncertainty. Ormerod shows how different social policies, like integration, for example, can fail because... Read more
Published 1 month ago by bronx book nerd

3.0 out of 5 stars why DO most things fail?
It's hard to get the answer to "Why Most Things Fail." The book goes deep into mathematical formulas. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Carolyn Thornlow

5.0 out of 5 stars counter intuitive findings
Paul has written a fascinating and entertaining book on the probability of failure and develops what he calls an extinction model. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Stephen Parry

1.0 out of 5 stars Give this a miss - interesting concept, badly written
I was looking forward to reading about insights into the high failure rate we observe in different walks of life. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Thomas Tan

3.0 out of 5 stars Systems (Both Social & Economical) -- Growing Evidence of Fractal & Power Law Connectivity
I have two perspectives for the review of Mr. Ormerod's fine book. First - if you are new to this subject, the book is interesting throughout as it helps explain, or at least... Read more
Published on May 26, 2007 by James East

5.0 out of 5 stars Why the subject of economics is in disequilibrium.
This book is the follow up to the excellent Butterfly Economics.

As I write this review, a leading conservative commentator on a television show broadcast by the Fox... Read more
Published on May 19, 2007 by Gerry O'neill

2.0 out of 5 stars Lousy pop economics
This book is written at the seventh grade level and is consistently vapid. There are intriguing ideas--the similarities of rates of extinction and failures of businesses, but... Read more
Published on May 1, 2007 by pogopogo

1.0 out of 5 stars Answer the Question
This book fails to answer the question posed in the title. It never explains why things fail. Rather it describes the pattern of failure in biology and economics. Read more
Published on January 12, 2007 by William Huneke

5.0 out of 5 stars How evolution explains business failures
This excellent, short work by Paul Ormerod is a worthy successor to his remarkably successful Butterfly Economics. Read more
Published on November 21, 2006 by Rolf Dobelli

5.0 out of 5 stars A dose of clarity for MBA's, Corporate Strategists & Market Analysts
This book should be essential reading in all MBA programs and boardrooms. Failure of many ventures is inevitable, any person with a few years of business experience can attest to... Read more
Published on October 17, 2006 by Jason Walters

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