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What Lego can teach us about saving the planet
A core feature of complex Lego sets holds big lessons for energy projects
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The principle of modularity, seen commonly in Lego model sets, provides a number of advantages that could be helpful in the transition to clean energy.
PHOTO: AFP
Tim Harford
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Can Lego save the world? That’s one idea that stuck with me reading How Big Things Get Done, a new book by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Flyvbjerg is perhaps the world’s leading authority on the failure of megaprojects – or how big things get done, but woefully late and at woeful cost – and so he makes an unlikely optimist.
Over the decades, Flyvbjerg, a management professor at Oxford university, has assembled a database of large projects from high-speed rail lines to hosting the Olympics.
