When battling with the instruction manual of your new digital camera it is common to ask yourself through gritted teeth: why are things that should be simple sometimes so darned complex?

It turns out you are not alone, and Simplexity is the friendly tome in which we meet the scientists searching for simple models to describe complex relationships, or revealing the complex nature of what appears to be simple so that it can be made simple again (to them, at least).

Take the stock market. Can we learn anything about crashes by observing fish, where only five per cent of fish in a school know the destination? Or are traders like molecules and the market analogous to gas under pressure? In other cases, models are shown to be redundant when it's too late.

The stairwells in the World Trade Centre towers were just wide enough in the 1970s, but by 11 September 2001, a far higher percentage of Americans were overweight and the emergency evacuation that morning was tragically slow. Kluger draws on a survivor's testimony of that day in his chapter on crowd behaviour, which is best described as a hybrid of fluid dynamics and human instinct, with gossip and panic acting as all-too-real variables.

All aspects of life on Earth are being placed under the microscope by scientists: Suharto's grip on Indonesia relied on a unique fungus in its soil which drives the forestry industry and greased the wheels of his regime; the tendency of U.S. audiences to give standing ovations at the drop of a hat bears a striking similarity to the mathematical theory that describes the downfall of apartheid and the Berlin Wall.

In the case of intractable political ideology, Kluger writes, "the complexities of moderation – a place where compromises are crafted and deals get struck – are cast aside for the simplicity of extremism, where nothing at all gets done."

But what can be learned from Simplexity? Kluger, a senior writer for Time magazine, doesn't offer too many predictions. Rather, his book is a prism through which any number of futures can be seen.

In the case of the developed world, where we are directing metabolic resources towards consumption and not procreation, an inevitable outcome will be that the joy of ingestion will become the horror of starvation when we run out of resources. But let's not worry about that for now…