The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

In the wake of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the quagmire in Iraq, and other apparently unexpected disasters, it seems reasonable to wonder about our stunted powers of prediction. Couldn't we have foreseen these debacles and others and taken steps to avoid them? Informed skeptic and former Wall Street trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb very much doubts it, and in this arresting meditation on our wrongheaded beliefs about what is and isn't likely - he draws his title from the illogical assumption that all swans are white - he explores how and why we're wired to get the future wrong. You may be put off by Taleb's discursiveness and, ironically, his smug certainty about our incurable "epistemic arrogance"; but in the face of his deeply considered arguments, it's hard not to agree that where human events are concerned our track record in forecasting (whether it's next year's recession or the next century's geopolitical fault lines) amounts to an aimless shot in the dark.