The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It's good to see a book that doesn't try on the false seduction of a 99p price tag, in order to gull the gullible reader into thinking he's getting it for 19 quid. And what better book to resist such a play upon the marginal theory of preference, that backbone of classical microeconomics, than Taleb's The Black Swan, which, along with a good many other swipes of its razor-sharp bill, takes a savage one at the fatuities of that particular pseudo-science.

It's difficult to categorise this book; on the face of it Taleb is a one-time trader on the financial and commodity markets, who has turned his attention to a more academic study of randomness qua our predictive capability, but really The Black Swan delivers a great deal more than this. I found it a fascinating book, not least because I came to the subject with absolutely no preconceptions at all (thus making me, I suspect, an ideal reader for the author).

It took me a long time to read - in small, digestible gobbets, which is how it's written - and while I found myself initially dismissive of Taleb's thesis, and irritated by his bumptious, self-aggrandising tone as a writer, I came to relish what he said, and even develop a sneaking affection for him as a person.

Because there's a lot of the author in this book: born in the Lebanon - or the Levant, as he prefers, anachronistically, to refer to it. The formative episode in Taleb's early life was the decades-long civil war. Indeed, he uses as a pertinent example of the human inability to accept the ugly welter of contingency, the way that refugees from this conflict - whom he knew - would sit for years in rented accommodation, their bags packed, waiting to return home again.

Not so Taleb, who's become something of a maven in the USA, where his term "known unknowns" was notoriously used by Donald Rumsfeld to describe the unforeseeably bloody flux, according to him and his Neocon apparatchiks, that Iraq descended into after the 2003 invasion.

But this isn't a treatise on the art of the possible in war. The Black Swans of the title aren't simply known unknowns; there are unknown unknowns - events, or inventions, or runaway successes, or indeed contingencies of any kind - for which no statistical analysis, or inductive reasoning can possibly arm us. They are events like 9/11, or Black Monday, or publishing phenomena like the Harry Potter books, or inventions such as the internet, all of which alter the human world. Interestingly, Taleb doesn't really examine the unknown unknowns of the natural world in great depth, although he notes that actuarial decisions on floods, hurricanes and so on, have the spread-bet character of casino operations. It would have been interesting to hear what he had to say about global warming.

I digress. Taleb's view is that our inability to get to grips with these unprecedented phenomena is, in part, hard-wired into us. But that's no excuse for the entire disciplines, both in business and academia, that have still been erected on the shifting sand of our ignorance. Economists, social scientists, philosophers, historians - all must feel the wrath of Taleb, but none more so than statisticians, whom he castigates for falling victim to the falsifications of the Gaussian Bell Curve.

I know, you're no more inclined to wrestle with the intricacies of this number-crunching that I was. You don't mind a Mandelbrotian fractal when it comes to marvelling at the near-replicating characteristics of nature, writ small then large, but you probably can't be arsed to - or think you can't - discover how this concept relates to probability theory. Don't be like that; for all his foibles, Taleb is a bouncy and even exhilarating guide to this arcane knowledge. With his digressions on thinkers such as Hayek and Karl Popper, and his anecdotes of strong-arm traders on Wall Street, and his mini-essays on all manner of things in life, from why casinos always make money, to the idiocies of the Nobel Prizes for Economics, he's like a middlebrow Montaigne - one of his heroes, we learn - with an exasperating prose style. Nothing wrong with that; and if I had quibbles with overconfident assertions (London taxi meters are calibrated for time, speed and distance, Taleb. They don't make extra money if they "seek out" traffic), and found his tics, like using the prefix "über" to describe thinkers he approves of, quite nauseating, I still enjoyed reading him.

As to Taleb's core assertions about the structure of human reality and our response to it, he dubs himself a "sceptical empiricist", who reasons from the world to books, rather than adopting the "Platonising" habits of academics and business analysts, and looking at the world through the lens of a prescriptive theory. On this basis he observes what I suspect all people with good, native common sense, and a healthy mistrust of intellectuals, observe. Namely, that shit happens.

Half way through The Black Swan, I was wishing he'd confined himself to this less than haiku-length aphorism, rather than stringing it out over 300-plus pages. At times Taleb can seem as though he's writing for the reader of business books who wants to believe that he's a secret maverick, and not like all the other people in business class reading The Black Swan. But when he's on form he has a pithy clarity, and if you're someone, like me, who's never given much consideration to whether we live in "Extremistan" or "Mediocristan" (Taleb's coinages), then it's well worth reading this book to find out.

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