Review: “Simplexity,” by Jeffrey Kluger

Long on promise, short on delivery. Kluger’s subtitle “Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can be Made Simple)” indicates that the reader is going to explore ways that complexity can be dialed up or dialed down. Instead, what a reader gets is 11 formulaic chapters expressing a question in the form “Confused by [blank]. Why do we … [insert irrational human behavior here]?”

While each chapter is well written with the aim of exploring subjective complexity - how our individual viewpoints determine the level at which we comprehend the complexity of any given subject - the book never even attempts to provide a framework for controlling the chaos (as the title would seem to suggest). Kluger writes clearly and enticingly, albeit listlessly and without structure, about a wide variety of subjects: stock markets, human psychology, Zipf’s law, the Availability Heuristic, Probability Neglect. In attempting to make complexity theories available to everyone, however, Kluger has created a bit of overly-simplified fluff (perfect for people that think “Freakonomics” is the best book ever) that doesn’t do service to the material or propose ways of applying the concepts beyond the cases in the book.