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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Book Type: Paperback
Published: 28 February 2008
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
RRP:£8.99
Best Discount: £2.75 (31%)
Cheapest price: £6.24
Prices last checked: 02/07/2008 22:48:34
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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Review:
This book was actually an enjoyable read. It is witty and humorous, though, as other reviewers point out, Taleb is basically infatuated with himself. But in spite of enjoying the intellectual challenges he throws at you throughout the book, I have to say that there is little real substance here. Why? Because his black swan is a dying duck. He argues that there is such a class of events as black swans - that is to say totally unpredicted events. But that "class" of events doesn't exist. Each one event that is unpredicted is a unique event and shares no common features with other such events apart from unexpectedness. He argues that the future can't be predicted accurately (well we all know that, and all too well, often from bitter experience). So, he argues, planning is virtually futile, because plans can't take account of the totally unexpected. Nothing new there, but applying his own technique of reverse-logic, if a plan is blown off course after 6 years, by an unexpected event, we can say that the plan was accurate enough to work from for 6 years. Is 6 years of workable planning worthless because in the 7th year the plan comes unstuck?
If his message only boils down to a warning not to assume that forecasts will be highly accurate for an indefinite period, then there is nothing new here - how many of us trust the weather forecast for the day after tomorrow? For those readers interested in economics Tony Lawson has done a much more thorough explanation of why economic forecasting is futile (if we expect forecasts to turn out to be accurate). According to Lawson, attempting to forecast is a highly valuable way of learning something about the economic forces that are at work in society, even when the forecasts go wrong. And Taleb's bias against governments and government plans is ridiculous. Governments don't need to know everything about everything in order to plan to build a bridge or a hospital.
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