PERSON
Bent Flyvbjerg
The Oxford professor whose three decades of megaproject research produced both the most damning empirical case against institutional optimism and the most precise diagnostic framework for the AI transition—the scholar who showed that
planning fallacies and
practical wisdom are the real subjects that artificial intelligence has forced back into view.
Bent Flyvbjerg has spent three decades measuring the same phenomenon in domain after domain—the systematic and irremediable gap between what human institutions predict about large-scale undertakings and what those undertakings actually produce—and in doing so has assembled the most rigorous empirical case in the social sciences for the claim that the dominant forms of modern knowledge are not the forms that govern consequential decisions. His database of megaproject performance, spanning hundreds of infrastructure projects across five continents, delivers a finding monotonous in its consistency: projects overrun their budgets, miss their deadlines, and underdeliver on their promised benefits, and the pattern does not improve over time, does not vary by geography, does not respond to advances in project management methodology. The explanation, which he worked out in parallel with the empirical record, draws on Aristotle's taxonomy of intellectual virtues: the projects fail not because they lack
episteme (universal