This book is an expatiation of Murphy's Law. The author argues that complex systems are vulnerable to failure and that failures are unpredictable because, in complex systems, the way failing components fail synergistically is inherently impossible to foresee.
The Challenger explosion, for example, has been blamed on a number of lapses in human judgment. But once one thing on the shuttle failed - I this case the O-rings on the solid rocket booster, an unanticipated cascade of failures followed. Similarly, the accident at Three Mile Island resulted from a faulty alarm which was known to be faulty, and was therefore ignored even as temperatures inside the containment dome were skyrocketing. The failure of a component, coupled with human misinterpretation of the failure. led to a cascade of bad events and wrong decisions.
Perrow emphasizes that these events might be attributed to human error, but the humans involved have not seen this sequences of events before, such a cascade of related failures was never anticipated, and the humans have no way to understand what is happening. So "operator error" is an illusion.
This book was written before the astounding disaster of Fukushima, but that series of catastrophes certainly fits Perrow's paradigm. Perrow is pessimistic about nuclear power. The fact that we haven't had more reactor disasters, Perrow says, is because the devices haven't yet had time to express themselves.
Any social scientist, physical scientist, or policymaker should read this book.
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