Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #241766 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 366 pages

Stephen J. Dubner, author of Freakonomics
`Great fun ... brash, stubborn, entertaining, opinionated, curious,

Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph
'An idiosyncratically brilliant new book'

Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph
`Idiosyncratically brilliant'

Customer Reviews

right, interesting, but extremely irritating
Taleb has one good idea, a great idea even, and an infinite number of ways of talking about it. It is essentially the same idea as his last book, Fooled by Randomness: namely that life does not behave with regularity. Those who think it does, he says, will always be tripped up by the unexpected. Black Swan extends that idea, beyond the financial markets he concentrated on in Randomness, to just about all walks of life. He is a magpie for anecdote and stray pieces of supporting evidence wherever he can find them. He calls all this 'skeptical empiricism'.
The qualification is that his big idea is not original, though his numerous examples do help bring home its ubiquity. More problematically, he overstates its usefulness. For when it comes to calling your next move, the unpredictable and the unexpected are, by definition, not things we can anticipate. And though he is right that in the long run there will undoubtedly by high impact improbably events, it is also true, as Keynes said, that in the long run we are all dead: organising your life on the principle that something radical might come along doesn't solve the everyday problem of what to next.
In short, he exaggerates his own insight and the authority it gives him. That's a wicked irony, for the chief target of his ire is those with an exaggerated sense of insight and control over their lives.
Oh, and the tone... Taleb wants to be seen as a radical iconoclast. Every sentence drips righteousness and often irritation. He is the strutting, impatient sage, the rest of us blinkered morons. Apparently he doesn't like his editors trying to change this. A word of advice to the author: if you want your advice heeded, don't shout and sneer at your audience. For this reason, an interesting thesis, but in the end a wearisome read.

enjoyable but sometimes irritating
This book is for most part engagingly written and full of entertaining stories and provocative ideas. It makes you reconsider things you take for granted in life and reevaluate your own perspective of the future. But at times I couldn't help feeling that the author was just too full of himself, too pleased with his own ideas and too disparaging towards other people's. Not only does this create a negative feeling but it also works against the book's objectivity. How can a theory be impartial and objective when its author is so in love with himself and his own ideas? Nevertheless this book is a very rewarding read. I would also recommend Nudge and Making Time - Nudge makes you realise how easy it would be to change human behaviour for the better, while Making Time is full of very provocative and stimulating ideas about how we perceive time and how we can control it in our lives. Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It

Extremely irritating.
When you get countless emails in a single fortnight offering "black swan" predictions for 2009, you start to wonder what kind of monster Taleb has unleashed. Black swans are unforecastable events. The fact that reasonably bright people can go away read this book and then start forecasting their own black swans shows how badly Taleb explains his key idea.

Not only is his thesis poorly articulated but, as Taleb admits, it is not even an original idea. Indeed it has been discussed by philosophers and economists for centuries. Black swan risks are commonly known as Knightian uncertainty in economics or, to quote Rumsfeld, "unknown unknowns" by everyone else. His "gray swans" are analagous to Rudi Dornbusch's "peso risks". I'm not sure sure Taleb adds a lot of value by renaming these concepts and then telling you how brilliant he is over 300 odd pages. Anyone who has already read the less self-indulgent "Fooled by Randomness" will not find much new here.

Despite, or perhaps because, Keynes, Knight and Dornbusch were writing far more intelligently about these concepts before him, Taleb has a pathological hatred of economists. Indeed he suggests that economists should have rats put down their shirts if they try to talk to you.

However, Taleb does make an exception. In a footnote he argues that "the smartest book I've seen in economics is Gave et al. since it transcends the constructed categories in academic economic discourse". Gave et al's "Our Brave New World", published back in 2005, argued that there was no bubble in the US or UK housing market, that volatility and risk premia in financial markets would go on being low thanks to a more sophisticated financial system efficiently pricing and distributing risk. The Gave book was clearly nonsense when I read it three years ago and now looks just laughable. It seems odd that Taleb should praise this book so highly given that in a recent US TV interview, when the interviewer, Charlie Rose asked him who had predicted the financial crisis, Taleb responded that Bob Shiller "got it right to some extent" but it was he who had realised that the global financial system "was a house of cards". This raises two questions. Firstly, if he was so adamant that the housing bubble would burst and cause a collpase in the financial system, why does he laud a book saying exactly the opposite? Secondly, if he had predicted the collapse of the global financial system then is it really a black swan? My personal opinion is that the financial crisis is best thought of as a "grey swan" or "peso" event: the exact chain of events was not predicted but a large number of economists have been concerned about systemic risk for years. Hence, contrary to one of Taleb's main arguments, not all consequential events in history come from the realm of the black swan.

Taleb makes extremely valid points about the limits to human knowledge. It is just a shame that he doesn't recognise that this also applies to him.