L’anticorpo del disordine

Resilience – Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World
Tim Harford

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Punti chiave: Cio’ che fa male fa anche bene (se produce diversità) – Diversificare il rischio produce resilienza – L’impulso burocratico a uniformare – Una triste notizia: noi confondiamo povertà e disordine – Altra triste notizia: confondiamo diversità e disordine – 

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Two centuries after Johann Gottlieb Beckmann had been tidying up messy ancient woodlands into neat rows of Norwegian spruce, the German forests were dying.

Note:LO SPORCO SEGRETO DEI BOTANICI

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merely removing fallen logs and dead trees would result in the loss of almost a third of non-bird wildlife species in a forest…over time they altered the ecology of the forest and exposed the trees to fungi

Note:SOTTOBOSCO

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None of this was anticipated by the foresters of yesteryear.

Note:ESPERTI

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In nature, mess often indicates health – and not only in the forest.

Note:SALUTE E COMPLESSITÀ

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stomach ulcers, which were thought to be caused by stress.

Note:ULCERE E STRESS

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ulcers weren’t caused by stress at all, but by a corkscrew-shaped bacteria, Helicobacter pylori.

Note:L’IDEA DI MARSHALL

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Barry Marshall drank a flask full of H. pylori…Finally Marshall and Warren had the attention of the medical profession….

Note:SPERIMENTAZIONE

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Blaser found that Americans who had H. pylori in their guts were far less likely to suffer from asthma…H. pylori helps prevent obesity by regulating a stomach enzyme called ghrelin…

Note:COLPO DI SCENA: IL BATTERIO FA BENE

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The view used to be that the human body was under assault from bacteria, and that antibiotics were an unalloyed good, albeit one to be used with care lest bacteria evolve resistance.

Note:ORTODOSSIA SUI BATTERI

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Some bacteria are dangerous, some are harmless passengers and some are beneficial. Some, such as H. pylori, can be dangerous or beneficial depending on the situation.

Note:AMICI O NEMICI?

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Martin Blaser has become one of the leading champions of the view that our bacterial guests are starting to become less diverse and that this thinning of the microbiome is doing us harm.

Note:L’ALLARME DI BLASER

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it was easier to stay slim in the 1980s…people today seem to be heavier than their forebears, even when they eat the same and are equally active….

Note:OBESITÀ

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people today have denuded gut bacteria

Note:SPIEGAZIONE

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Lactobacillus sakei – another of those bacteria we have cluttering up our bodies – appears to prevent sinusitis

Note:SINUSITI

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The most disgusting example concerns the treatment of Clostridium difficile gut infections…C. difficile itself is increasingly resistant to antibiotics. But now a near-miraculous cure has been discovered…The treatment in question was faecal microbiota transplantation – which is a polite way to describe blending a healthy person’s excrement with a little salty water, and injecting the mixture into the patient via the obvious orifice….

Note:CLOSTRIDUM

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Why, then, are our microbes going missing? The most obvious culprit is the routine use of antibiotics.

Note:IL DANNO DEGLI ANTIBIOTICI

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A third explanation is the rise of the caesarean section, which is now how almost a third of American babies come into the world. Babies collect a rich broth of microbes from their mothers, but this transfer does not occur in the womb as one might expect. Instead, they are smeared with bacteria as they pass through the birth canal

Note:COLPA DEL CESAREO?

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It is worth acknowledging that these ideas have already become a fad – a great deal of nonsense is now being talked by quacks and purveyors of probiotic yoghurt aiming to promote a ‘healthy microbiome’.

Note:CIARLATANI

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if you try to control a complex system, suppressing or tidying away the parts that seem unimportant, you are likely to discover that those parts turn out to be very important indeed.

Note:CONSEGUENZE NON INTENZIONALI

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Jane Jacobs, urban writer and campaigner, made the case for neighbourhood diversity in The Death and Life of Great American Cities…Diversity at street level was made possible by a mix of offices and homes, stores and workshops. It was also made possible, Jacobs argued, by a mix of old and new buildings….

Note:LA DIVERSITÀ NELLE CITTÀ

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It is preferable, she argued, to have an inefficient hodgepodge of different industries than to specialise in a single industry, however efficient that might seem in the short term. One of her favourite examples was the unromantic mess of Birmingham, the second-largest city in England. Birmingham is famous for making nothing in particular

Note:BIRMINGHAM

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When Jane Jacobs was admiring Birmingham in the early 1960s, her view seemed odd. Detroit, the quintessential one-industry town, was booming…specialised cities were fragile….

Note:DETROIT VS BRMNGHAM

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AnnaLee Saxenian, an economist and political scientist, published a study comparing two famous technology clusters, Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128.

Note:SILICON VALLEY

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the technology companies of Route 128 – companies such as Wang, Raytheon and Sun – kept themselves in tidy silos, specialising in narrow fields of excellence. The fledgling companies of Silicon Valley sprawled into each other, engineers constantly gossiping with one another

Note:BOSTON ROUTE: ORDINE E STANDARD

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Hidalgo has discovered that there is a strong correlation between being a diversified economy, a complex economy and a rich economy…highly diversified economies also tend to be rich…

Note:RICCHEZZA E DIVERSITÀ

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Diverse economies, like diverse German forests, are more resilient.

Note:CAPACITÀ DI RISPONDERE ALLE CRISI

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The old proverb ‘jack of all trades, master of none’…Perhaps that is true of an individual; it’s not true of a city or a country….

Note:PROVERBI VALIDI PER LE PERSONE MA NON PERLE COMUNITÀ

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If people prefer to live near similar people – perhaps people of the same race, class, ethnicity or income – then even quite mild preferences can lead to marked social segregation.

Note:MA DIVERSIFICARE È UN PROBLEMA

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a bureaucratic desire for tidy, segregated cities is expressed in zoning and planning

Note:IL DESIDERIO DI SEGREGAZIONE DELLA BUROCRAZIA

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Recall how Jane Jacobs’s ballet of Hudson Street relied on the fact that the street was active at any time of day, because so many different kinds of people used it. In contrast, thoroughly zoned neighbourhoods are unbalanced. They are too busy at certain times, deathly quiet at others

Note:DORMITORI

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I had published a study which showed that messy streets lead to greater intolerance. In a messy environment, people are more likely to resort to stereotypes of others…But within a few months of publication, social psychologists received some unsettling news: Diederik Stapel was a fraud….

Note:CASINO E INTOLLERANZA… L’ORDINE CI RENDE PIÙ BUONI? UNO STUDIO FRADOLENTO

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Stapel, the newspaper reported, ‘had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions’. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results

Note:L’EDITORE VOLEVA RISULTATI CHIARI

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It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty – instead of the truth.’

Note:BELLEZZA CONTRO VERITÀ

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The story of the ‘broken windows’ theory of urban decay is another example of how we instinctively overestimate the benefits of tidying up certain kinds of urban mess.

Note:BROKEN WINDOW SOPRAVVALUTATA

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The truth is that social science has not been able to muster much support for the broken windows theory of policing

Note:POCO SUPPORTO

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four factors seemed to explain the timing, extent and geographical pattern of the fall in crime: more police; a larger prison population (this may deter crime, and will also prevent crimes because would-be criminals are locked up); the waning of an epidemic of crack use; and the legalisation of abortion in the 1970s,

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LEVITT... FATTORI PIÙ INFLUENTI

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Thacher is right – certain kinds of mess are worth tidying up for their own sake. But it’s striking how easily we fall for the old-fashioned idea that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’

Note:BIAS: DISORDINE => MALE

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Sampson and Raudenbush conducted a survey of thousands of Chicago residents, asking them about their own perceptions of disorder…Then they compared the subjective perceptions…with the objective observations…

Note:DISORDINE PERCEPITO

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Neighbourhoods with many poor families, or with a high proportion of African American residents, or both, were perceived as being more disordered…If we want to predict whether a city block’s residents think that it’s a mess, we would learn more from looking at data on race and poverty…

Note:POVERTÀ SCAMBIATA PER DISORDINE

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Academics with Jewish ancestry found their careers in ruins. The best of them left, seeking less intolerant cultures in Britain and the United States. A torment for those that fled, this policy was also a self-inflicted wound. German science was crippled. Despite a formidable industrial base and engineering tradition, Germany was unable to keep pace with the innovations that emerged from Britain and the United States – often from the very people who had been driven out.

Note:LA RICERCA DEPURATA DAGLI EBREI

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he compared it to the impact of bombing raids on university departments during the war. He found the damage from losing Jewish or dissident scientists was far greater and longer lasting than the damage to offices or laboratory facilities.

Note:WALDINGER

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Ottaviano and Peri found that cities which hosted a complex patchwork of nationalities prospered as a result.

Note:MELTING POT

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Recall that Katherine Phillips and her colleagues found that small student groups disliked having a stranger in their midst, even as the stranger was helping them solve the murder-mystery problem they faced.

IL CORPO ESTRANEO