Where are the editors?

Why is financial prose so often so faulty. Re-reading Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed now, and it is
in many ways a fine book. He's got a great theme going: arrogant believers in pure rationality versus the old guard, trusting experience. Intellect vs. instinct. In some ways it revisits John Henry and the steam engine.

And yet, who was editing this book? There are so many portents, omens, signs, indications, auguries and foreshadowings that it's all excessively overdetermined. Pretty much every page has some version of, "seen in in hindsight, it's now clear that blah." Hindsight is famously easy after the fact. Who are the editors that let all these omens through? Cmon guys, work a little.

But John Meriwether is really, right up with Mohammed Atta, a figure crying out for a biopic. Great dramatic material for both of them, if different. What are the Weinstein brothers up to if not making these movies? Slackers.

Back to the question of books, take Peter Bernstein's Against the Gods. Again, a classic, sui generis, the only good general history of the development of probability theory there is. But the chapter structure leaves something to be desired. There are like 20 chapters, each of them dedicated to a seminal figure in the history of probability and risk assessment. Each chapter is this: there was this guy, he was really smart, but also eccentric (drank a lot, whored a lot, played cards), he contributed blah to the theory of risk, with blah taking 8-10 pages.

First off, this violates the basic principle that any given narrative can have a limited number of highpoints, typically 3 or 4. The story must rise to and fall from them. You just can't have 20 peaks. Again, an editor could have done wonders.