Some time ago I came across a book review by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, and while I often skip book reviews (I have enough books to read already), I read that one in part because it was by Gladwell and in part because it was subtitled: "Albert O. Hirschman and the power of failure." Intriguing enough, isn't it? At least for the failure part. As for Hirschman, I have to admit I'd never heard of him before.
Gladwell begins his review by recounting how digging through Hoosac Mountain to create the railway connecting Boston to the Hudson River, back in the nineteenth century, which had been thought to be very manageable, ended up costing over ten times the budgeted estimate. "If the people involved had known the true nature of the challenges they faced, they would never have funded the Troy-Greenfield railroad. But, had they not, the factories of northwestern Massachusetts wouldn't have been able to ship their goods so easily to the expanding West, the cost of freight would have remained stubbornly high, and the state of Massachusetts would have been immeasurably poorer. So is ignorance an impediment to progress or a precondition to it?"
Economist Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012), Gladwell explains, loved questions like this one - about unintended consequences, perverse outcomes, "the many ways in which plans did not turn out the way they were supposed to." A key thesis of his was that people don't seek out challenges; instead, they are "apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence if a challenge - because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be."
The book Gladwell was reviewing in his essay was Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, by Jeremy Adelman. I thought Hirschman's theories sounded interesting, and certainly more understandable than many other economists' theories, but I wouldn't have bought the biography if it hadn't been for Hirschman's remarkable path: a German refugee who'd fled the rise of Hitler to make a home in Paris, he volunteered to fight in Spain on the side of the Loyalists at age 21 and, after spending the first half of the war in France, emigrated to the United States (but not before helping refugees escape France) - first to Berkeley and then to Washington, DC for a stint on the Federal Reserve Board.
In his mid-thirties he brought his whole family to Colombia (in spite of other relatives' concerns for his safety) on a whim for a World Bank project - and ended up spending the happiest four years of his life there, according to Gladwell. He then spent time at Yale and later Columbia, Harvard and the Institute for Advanced Study.
My favorite part of Gladwell's article is in the last page, when he discusses Hirschman's seminal work, "Exit, Voice and Loyalty", about "the two strategies that people have for dealing with badly performing organizations and institutions": exit (voting with your feet in a silent protest) or voice (choosing to speak up, trying to bring change from within).
German intellectual fleeing a rising dictatorship? Exile to the United States? Needless to say, I ordered the book shortly after finishing the review. I am about 150 pages in so far (out of 700) - Hirschman is in Paris at the beginning of World War II. The book is enjoyable to read, erudite but not overly so, deeply researched without being ponderous, and truly makes Hirschman come to life.
The book has also been reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Cass Sunstein. Here is how that review starts: "Albert Hirschman, who died late last year, was one of the most interesting and unusual thinkers of the last century. An anti-utopian reformer with a keen eye for detail, Hirschman insisted on the complexity of social life and human nature." The NYRB review is perhaps better structured than the one in the New Yorker and gives the reader a better sense of Hirschman's main works - so if you don't plan on learning more about Hirschman, go for the NYRB piece - but both do a wonderful job in making the reader want to pick the book they review. Adelman's biography is nothing short of a resounding achievement.
