Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Writing Career

Writing Career

Taleb's first non-technical book, Fooled by Randomness, about the underestimation of the role of randomness in life, was published in 2001.

His second non-technical book, The Black Swan, about unpredictable events, was published in 2007, selling as of February 2011, close to 3 million copies. It spent 36 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list ; 17 as hardcover and 19 weeks as paperback. and was translated into 31 languages. The Black Swan has been credited with predicting the banking and economic crisis of 2008.

Taleb's non-technical writing style mixes a narrative style (often semi-autobiographical) and short philosophical tales together with historical and scientific commentary. The sales of Taleb's first two books garnered an advance of $4 million for a follow-up book on anti-fragility.

A book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, was released in December 2010.

In 2007, in The Black Swan, Taleb warned about the coming crisis:

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur .... I shiver at the thought.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deem these events "unlikely".

Among the people Taleb's writing has influenced is writer Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker. Gladwell wrote, "We associate the willingness to risk great failure – and the ability to climb back from catastrophe – with courage. But in this we are wrong. That is the lesson of Nassim Taleb."