Review of 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is perfectly apt, pretty much essential, that this book should be a black swan: an unexpected bestseller, topping the New York Times non-fiction lists. Otherwise Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s theory wouldn’t carry nearly the weight that it does. A quirky and engaging writer, Taleb’s central thesis is that we are frequently taken for suckers by the unexpected. Until the discovery of Australia, everyone in Europe believed swans could only be white. We should be careful of all the certainties we hold and be ready to be sceptical about our beliefs. Not in a Cartesian manner following the Descartes fashion (Taleb, for reasons not entirely clear, rejects this throw out all of your beliefs and start again line of thought). Rather we should be very wary of trusting established models for forecasting in economics, society, cultural and natural trends. Will the sun rise tomorrow? – probably, but Taleb takes great pleasure in chronicling the fallacies of the ‘bildungsphilisters’ – the intellectual economic forecasters who believe the world will conform to their platonic models only to discover time after time that, well, shit happens.

Taleb’s message is an apt one for the modern interconnected world. The future (which of course can’t be predicted) will probably be dominated by a few more J.K. Rowlings and Bill Gates who inhabit what Taleb calls extremistan, and a greater number of dissatisfied and disenfranchised unfortunates (mediocristan). As a Humanist, Taleb says, he hates this disparity, and it hardly tallies with those in mediocristan who cling to the protestant work ethic view of life, that the harder you work the proportionally greater the rewards. But he offers succour to the second rate towards the end of the book with the tale of Yevgenia Krasnova, a novelist whose first novel is an unexpected success and her second book is an equally unexpected flop. There is charm in secure mediocrity, and wild success is not always all it is cracked up to be. Take comfort in the fact that you are a black swan – the biggest black swan of all, by virtue of your birth against gigantic odds.

Once the central message is grasped, you don’t really need to plough through all of the book , which is overlong at some 300 pages, unless you want to take in all the quirky asides and stories about the author’s intellectual friends and colleagues and detailed economic theories deconstructing the Gaussian Bell Curve. A vast array of obscure economists and philosophers are referenced which comes across as intellectually show-offy, and Taleb’s style is a clunking dog’s dinner, peppered with faux yiddishisms such as ‘nobel schnobel’ and prefixing any thinker he admires with the Germanic ‘über’. Still, it is partially inthis linguistic naivety, uprooted from his Lebanese homeland (or Levantine as he anachronistically calls his roots), and finding a place in the world as an eccentric commodoties trader in New York, that he is an eccentric and admirable writer. Someone who sees a crowd, and deliberately heads off in the other direction.

By Fred Bosanquet