Hirschman made his arguments without mathematical formulas or complex models. His subject was economics, but his spirit was literary.
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Scooped by
Beth Kanter
onto Failure and Learning June 20, 2013 8:57 AM
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Albert O. HIrschman was a economist. This essay by Malcolm Gladwell shares stories of his life and philosophy about doubt, creativity, and failure.
Great storytelling, but some juicy bits about failure.
Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.
While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian’s finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede—in fact we find it intolerable to imagine—that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning. . . . Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry: we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.