Antifragile

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering, a distinguished research scholar at Said Business School at Oxford and the best-selling author of The Black Swan, among many other works.

As befits an author of his credentials, Taleb’s book is brilliant, confusing, idiosyncratic, useful and irritating – sometimes all at once. Everyone understands that if something is fragile, it breaks. Taleb’s core idea – profound and almost revolutionary – is that while fragility poses a danger to complex systems and is a growing menace to the increasingly interrelated global economy, the opposite of fragile is not, for example, robust or sturdy.