Supercalifragilistic

Theory-making is an a posteriori exercise. From empirical observation and some tinkering about are drawn exp­lanations and rules for what is supposed will be effective, what will not, and why. This bottom-up approach is readily acknowledged of fields such as rhetoric. No one knows the first tricolon; everyone recognises it in Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici”; someone is creating one of his own right now. Theory, which can be seen as a collection of heuristic templates, itself becomes a template for action. In the world of mathematical modelling for finance and stockbroking—of which Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former quant, has had humbling and exhilarating experien­ces—theory-in-action has in recent years come to be equated with disaster. During the time, displaying ‘antifragility’ of the kind he associates with prostitution and taxi-driving, Taleb has thrived by writing about those experiences. His first two books, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, made straightforward points: that we are slaves to randomness and that extraordinary, unpr­edictable events (or black swans) change life and the world in extraordinary, unpredictable ways—esp­ecially if you are punting stocks. Both were bestsellers. In his latest book, he expounds on antifragility, his coinage for the ability of individuals and systems to occasionally get stronger from all that buffeting. He is, one supposes, weather-worn enough to recognise that such resilience, also a chance occurrence, is not subject to some of the theorising he indulges in with the panache of a Rabelais at the lectern.

To describe rebound strength, common enough in systems, not so in individuals, Schumpeter coined the easy paradox of “creative destruction”, the dying away of individual ideas or businesses as they are supplanted by better and more profitable ones. Like “survival of the fittest” in biology, it has become a shibboleth of evolutionary economics and entrepreneurship. But Taleb’s magpie mind cannot settle for tame expresion. Sample some of his coinages: “Soviet-Harvard illusion”, the belief in theory, especially if it comes from a well-named, well-famed department; “fragilista”, a usually humourless person who causes fragility by pretending to understand (even believing he understands) what exactly is going on; “rational flaneur”, one who opportunistically changes his schedule or destination at every step, based on new discovery or new information. But the entertainment dulls soon, as in his earlier books.

What is compelling about Taleb is the promiscuity of the examples he uses and the stomping assuredness with which he articulates his views on medicine, weight-lifting, prophets, pharmaceutics, even his own books. One does not find Mithridates (the fabled homoeopathic self-poisoner), Matt Ridley (a science writer and, incidentally, a reviewer of this book), Almutanabbi (a poet whom, Taleb declares, any polyglot with some Arabic would rate above all the rest), Andre Malraux, Fabian the Cunctator, St Thomas Aquinas, Mel Brooks, Simonides and an olive basketful of Levantine philosophers toget­her within the covers of many books. And, of course, Taleb, who describes himself as “an intellect­ual with the appearance of a bodyguard”, could not have avoided Seneca: any physical culturist who reads at all, this sufficiently, if temporarily, Talebised reviewer can aver and asseverate, would swear only by that Roman Stoic. Sen­eca’s life and writing undergo a unique reading, though: indifference to fate after one, like Taleb, has made his “f*** you money”,  wealth enough to bring the benefits of wealth (chiefly the freedom to occupy oneself with exactly what one likes) without its ill-effects.

Without the peacock feathers and iridescence, Taleb’s book is an argument for capitalism and competitive evolution in business. It speaks for the creation and maintenance of economic regimens with built-in fragility to allow what is for the moment antifragile to survive, strut about—and be prepared, Seneca-like, for the sudden suicide order from the emperor. But stocktrader that he has been, for all his talk of the unpredictability of the unpredictable, Taleb sees sha­dow-hope in rules of the thumb and guesswork. Russell wrote of an astrologer who fibbed when his methods failed but believed his superiors had methods that worked. But Taleb believes Taleb has a method, protean and ever-adaptible. “By grasping the mechanisms of antifragility,” he writes, “we can build a systematic and broad guide to nonpredictive decision-making under uncertainty....” Gymnosophist or fragilista?