The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Monday, May 31st, 2010
Considering that I called Taleb’s previous book “a double-barreled time-waster”, it’s odd that I read this one at all, much less that the ideas in it obsessed me for a couple of weeks. Maybe a nine month period of unemployment which started four months after I read his last work changed my perspective. Certainly “The Black Swan” owes much of its popularity to the good fortune of having been published only a short while before the global economic meltdown.
“The Black Swan” is about the idea that there are unpredictable events – “black swans” – that can have huge consequences. To a lesser extent, it’s about how to arrange things so that you are relatively unaffected by the inevitable but unpredictable catastrophes that lurk in our future. This isn’t a financial advice book but Taleb does argue for putting 80% of one’s savings in cash and 20% in high-risk bets that have the potential of big payoffs. However, once you’ve accepted his argument that bad things can happen, what can you really do about it? Should we really devote our lives to avoiding risk?
Taleb is an engaging writer, and this is a thought-provoking book (and heaven knows thought-provoking books are themselves black swans). He makes a very good case for the idea that our interconnected, automated world puts increasingly at the mercy of black swan events.
This book might change the way you look at the world, but it won’t help you sleep at night.
