The cover of Fluke by Brian Klaas
Business and economics

Book review: Beyond the butterfly effect

Brian Klass’ Fluke challenges notions of fate and individualism, highlighting how seemingly random events shape our lives profoundly

When he was 20 years old, writes political scientist Brian Klaas in Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, his father told him that his grandfather—Klaas’ great-grandfather—had come home from work one day to find his wife had killed their four children and herself. For the young man processing that gruesome story, one fact came quickly to the surface: his father, the grandchild of great-grandfather’s subsequent marriage, would never have existed without that tragedy. And no father, no Brian Klaas. In the kind of story that humans remember, reflect upon and often use to guide their actions and lives, Klaas was the child of murder. 

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Similarly “fluke-ish” is the better-known story that opens Klaas’ book, made newly prominent thanks to the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer. It’s about how Henry Stimson’s enthralled visit to Kyoto in 1926 protected the ancient Japanese city from becoming the world’s first atomic bomb target 19 years later when Stimson was U.S. Secretary of War. Instead, the Enola Gay flew to Hiroshima. 

But Klaas has not written another list of fateful historical coincidences. In part, his purpose is to show how storytelling defines and often misleads people. But mostly he wants to demonstrate that his story is the story of all of us. What-if moments, almost all of them far from Stimson- or even Klaas-level in their consequences, set or block career paths, lead to or away from personal relationships, and arbitrarily deposit us in whatever place we call home.  

And for all that, Klaas writes, we mostly ignore, “the moments that we will never realize were consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives.”   

Or how we affect everyone else with our actions—those alive and even those yet to be. We (and not another) took this job, we (and not another) had a child with this partner, we (and not another) grabbed the last available seat on a plane that crashed; by so doing sent ripple after ripple into the universe, each one a change-maker, just as all the people and all the other organisms that led to humans did before us. “We control nothing,” writes Klaas, “but influence everything.” The implications, for everything from our devotion to autonomy and individualism through our basic ability to understand our fluke-riddled world to our dangerous drive to eliminate rather than add slack to economic and industrial systems, are immense.  

The bulk of Fluke consists of Klaas unpacking those implications with urgency, verve and persuasive power. In his “more slack, please” case, he points to how a single ship stuck in the Suez Canal caused massive and expensive disruptions in international supply chains optimized to just-in-time efficiency. On the other side, Klaas praises how the electrical grid in Chile is designed—at the cost of overall efficiency—for local grids to be easily decoupled from the national system, a development that paid off after a major 8.8 magnitude earthquake in 2010. The decoupling stopped what would have been a cascading national failure and weeks of country-wide blackouts. 

Klass also argues that we do not fully understand either ourselves or our randomized environment, where uncountable tiny actions tend to shred forecasts regarding any wide-scale human activity. In large part, that’s because predictions, all of which carry an unspoken “if things carry on as they have” proviso buried in their fine print, tend to alter behaviour by the very fact of being publicized.  

In 2016, the Economist magazine looked back at all 21st-century forecasts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), covering a period when individual countries entered recessions on 220 occasions. The IMF forecasts come every six months, once in April and once in October, the latter having the benefit of half the actual data for the year. So, how often did they see the coming downturns? The October ones, about half the time, the April predictions, zero. Yes, zero. We can land a vessel on a four-km-wide comet travelling at 135,000 kph, because physics only randomizes at its quantum edges, but human affairs are inherently chaotic.  

As for our belief in individualism, Klaas realizes the facts of the matter—with 1.3 bacteria cells in our bodies for every purely human cell, plus a load of fungi, bacteria, archaea and viruses, we are not exactly alone in this world. The “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” narrative has enormous, visceral appeal, for which there is no better evidence than the groaning self-help shelves in bookstores.  

That doesn’t mean Klaas ascribes to the traditional flip side in human attitudes, the belief that everything is decided by blind fate or divine providence. Rather, it is how the interconnection of all things brings surprise and serendipity, joy as well as sorrow, into our lives, that moves him. There are few if any starring roles in human affairs, Klaas argues, but we each play our part.