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Megan McArdle says that recognizing failure—and in some cases embracing it—is a crucial part of what makes American markets and society successful.
Megan McArdle joins us to talk about her new book The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success (2014). We don’t tend to think of failure as a good thing. But McArdle says that recognizing failure—and in some cases embracing it—is a crucial part of what makes American culture, markets, and society successful. But she also says we’re getting worse at dealing with failure. Is the world too fragile to tolerate failure now?
Show Notes and Further Reading
Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success (book)
Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (book)
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (book)
Bruce M. Hood, SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelieveable (book)
Megan McArdle is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes on economics, business and public policy. She is the author of The Up Side of Down (2014). McArdle previously wrote for Newsweek-the Daily Beast, the Atlantic and the Economist. She has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Aaron Powell founded Libertarianism.org. He is now the host of (Re)Imagining Liberty, a podcast about the case for radical freedom.
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.