OPTIMAL ILLUSIONS | on sale 9/12/2023 | PRH | Amazon | Bookshop
A mathematician explains how optimization took over the world, arguing that we urgently need a new approach.
Optimization is the driving principle of our modern world. We now can manufacture, transport, and organize things more cheaply and faster than ever. Optimized models underlie everything from airline schedules to dating site matches. We strive for efficiency in our daily lives, obsessed with productivity and optimal performance. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsized cultural shape? And what is lost, when efficiency is gained?
This sharp, character-driven narrative traces the history of optimization from its roots in America’s founding principles through the work of oil tycoons, wildlife ecologists, Silicon Valley technologists, lifestyle gurus, sugar beet farmers, and poker players. It turns a keen eye to the technologies and assumptions that have come to comprise not just our material reality, but what we make of it.
Coco Krumme’s work in scientific computation has made her acutely aware of optimization’s overreach. Streamlined systems are less resilient. They limit our options and narrow our perspectives. The malaise of an optimized society can feel profoundly inhumane. Optimal Illusions exposes the sizable bargains we have made in the name of optimization, and asks us to consider what comes next.