Too Easy to be Cynical

In New York on business, I picked up a copy of today’s Financial Times and read (among other things) this commentary. Its rather chilling conclusion:

[Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara described 11 errors in Vietnam: every one was also made in Iraq and Afghanistan. … in 1969, Forbes wrote that the time had returned when investors were going to talk about products, not earnings curves. Forbes spoke at least 40 years too soon. McNamara began his memoirs with a quotation from T.S. Eliot: ‘The end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.’ Perhaps the acquisition of such knowledge might be his memorial.

Those are neither new nor unique sentiments. To the contrary, they’re entirely consistent with Paul Ormerod’s conclusion two years ago in his book, Why Most Things Fail, the premise of which was essentially and depressingly this: There’s too much to know, so our chances of success — at anything — are really no better than the random chance of genetic mutations and the evolution of species.

Comforting, isn’t it?

Perhaps I should travel to New York on business a little less often.