The End of Average

Both the strength and the weakness of this book is that it weaves such a strong narrative around its central thesis: using averages to understand people is seductive and pervasive, but ultimately destructive, and it's only by truly understanding the individual that we can make progress.

The quality of the narration reflects my reservation with the book as a whole. It's excellently and confidently read, but the tone it's presented in strikes an uncomfortable balance between a popular science book and a 5-steps-to-success style self-improvement manual. I found myself flicking between being astounded by the exposé of how "averagarian" thinking pervades our lives, and wincing at the overstretching the book does to tie the wide-ranging topics it covers into a single timeline of cause and effect.

This unwavering structure certainly makes for a focused and compelling read, but also overcooks the message and leans on some ungrounded generalizations. The constant inference that runs throughout is that the book's solutions to the very real problems it investigates are THE solutions to personal well-being, financial success and social harmony. Ironically, as it introduces you to a range of genuinely fascinating and paradigm-shifting ideas, the book itself can provide you with the critical framework needed to question its own sweeping conclusions.

Hyperbolic presentation aside, the ideas contained within are presented with clarity, backed up with references to fascinating studies and real-world examples, and clearly ARE powerful tools for understanding... potentially even revolutionary ones. It's the sort of read that makes you want to stop every few paragraphs to tell someone the mind-blowingly simple idea you've just discovered, or recount the results of a startling psychological study.

I truly hope the precepts of individualism that this book presents spread. But I also hope that they're not treated as the one-range-of-sizes-fit-all solutions that they're presented as, or the future might render them as limiting as the once-compelling ideas of averagearianism that they aim to replace. It would be a shame if 100 years from now your kids are reading "The End of the Individual: How We Progress in a World That Can't See Beyond the Singular".