I just finished reading Nassim Taleb’s second great book, and I highly recommend it.

His point — oversimplified — is that we do not understand the frequency of rare, high-impact events (black swans) because they do not fit into our perception. (We usually tell stories to explain things ex-post and we often extrapolate from the past.) That may not be a problem EXCEPT that financial “wizards” have made the fatal mistake of “normalizing” the distribution of events to look like a Bell Curve (or Gaussian distribution). What this means in practice is that they boldly predict that “so-and-so is likely to happen once in 100 years,” and are then proven wrong over and over. (Reminds me of the hundred year flood fallacy…)

He also takes some time to tear apart economic models, assumptions of perfect rationality, use of the expected utility function, etc. I agree whole-heartedly with this critique and the implication that academic economists are not only useless but dangerous advisers on real-world problems. He holds up Hayek’s ideas on the “knowledge problem” (our inability to know everything in one place at one time means that we cannot make “right” decisions from a central point. The alternative — disaggregated decision-making via markets and prices — is much more efficient and less likely to produce catastrophic failures like those we’ve seen in the financial markets.)

Finally, Taleb predicted (accurately) the self-destruction of the financial markets that has been driven by unrealistic beliefs on the occurrence of “rare but dangerous” events…

Bottom Line: If you only read five books on markets and economics, make this one of them (I’ll put up a reading list if I get this teaching thing cleared up…).