Why Do Complex Systems Thrive on Trial And Error?
By
NPR/TED Staff |
NPR
Friday, July 29, 2016
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Tim Harford on the TED Stage
James Duncan Davidson
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TED
Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Failure Is An Option
About Tim Harford's TED Talk
Economist Tim Harford identifies similar characteristics in successful industrial and economic systems. They work much better, he says, when they're constantly evolving through trial and error.
About Tim Harford
Tim Harford is an economist and a journalist. In the Undercover Economist column he writes for the Financial Times, he looks at familiar situations in unfamiliar ways and explains the fundamental principles of the modern economy.
His book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure, argues that the world has become far too unpredictable and complex for today's challenges to be tackled with ready-made solutions and expert opinions. Instead, Harford suggests, we need to learn to embrace failure and to constantly adapt, to work from the bottom up rather than the top down.
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