‘Things fall apart,” W.B. Yeats observed of the world he saw around him nearly a century ago. And they still do. Chris Clearfield, a former derivatives trader, and András Tilcsik, a Toronto business-school professor, have written “Meltdown” to tell us how and why.
We live in a world of ever more complex systems, the authors note, with unobservable components and unimagined interconnections. Dense global networks may have made the world smaller, but they have also created the conditions in which small glitches can cascade into...