How Failure Improve Society

There is a guest post by Tim Harford, the author of Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, on the Freakonmics blog.

From his post:

I’ve been studying how these processes of experimenting and adapting have worked, or failed to work, in dealing with some of the important problems we face today, from promoting innovation to preventing future financial meltdowns. And I’ve also been exploring our psychological responses to failure – why we fear even small setbacks, and how we can over-react when things are going badly. I’ve concluded that adapting in the face of failure is absolutely vital – and a more painful challenge than I at first expected.