Black Swans: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has redefined how we see the world. An options trader and scholar turned philosopher, he is one of the very people who predicted the financial crisis. In doing so, he devised the concept of "Black Swan Events" to describe unexpected shocks to our collective system. In his new, paperback version of The Black Swan, he outlines what's still wrong with our economic system, why we are unequipped to handle the world's problems and why many of our experts, in his view, know less than cab drivers. Taleb's is an iconoclastic, provocative, idiosyncratic view of our world. But it's one we can't afford to ignore. My conversation with Nassim Nicholas Taleb: