Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (And
How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple)
By Jeffrey Kluger
WHY are the instruction
manuals for cell phones
incomprehensible?
WHY is a truck driver’s job
as hard as a CEO’s?
HOW can 10 percent of
every medical dollar cure
90 percent of the world’s
disease?
WHY do bad teams win so
many games?
Complexity, as any scientist will tell you, is a slippery idea. Things
that seem complicated can be astoundingly simple; things that
seem simple can be dizzyingly complex. A houseplant may be
more intricate than a manufacturing plant. A colony of garden
ants may be more complicated than a community of people. A
sentence may be richer than a book, a couplet more complicated
than a song.
These and other paradoxes are driving a whole new science—
simplexity—that is redefining how we look at the world and using
that new view to improve our lives in fields as diverse as
economics, biology, cosmology, chemistry, psychology, politics,
child development, the arts, and more. Seen through the lens of
this surprising new science, the world becomes a delicate place
filled with predictable patterns—patterns we often fail to see as
we're time and again fooled by our instincts, by our fear, by the
size of things, and even by their beauty.
In Simplexity, Time senior writer Jeffrey Kluger shows how a
drinking straw can save thousands of lives; how a million cars can
be on the streets but just a few hundred of them can lead to
gridlock; how investors behave like atoms; how arithmetic governs
abstract art and physics drives jazz; why swatting a TV indeed
makes it work better. As simplexity moves from the research lab
into popular consciousness it will challenge our models for modern
living. Jeffrey Kluger adeptly translates newly evolving theory into a
delightful theory of everything that will have you rethinking the
rules of business, family, art—your world.
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| ABOUT THE BOOK |
