35 pages • 1 hour read
Nassim Nicholas TalebThe Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context
Nassim Taleb approaches his subject matter in The Black Swan through three main lenses: his formative experiences in Lebanon, his professional trajectory as a trader, and his own ideology. As a young person growing up in Lebanon, Taleb was an avid reader, intellectually curious and interested in political discourse. When civil war erupted in Lebanon between Christians and Muslims in 1975, Taleb confronted a Black Swan. Taleb couldn't process how Christians and Muslims, who had maintained peace for hundreds of years, decided to engage in a civil war that would forever alter the history and memory of a nation—this war was Lebanon's Black Swan. Thus, Taleb's connection to the idea of Black Swans is ingrained in deeply personal experiences.
Taleb also refers to his former work as an options trader. He has intricate knowledge of economic systems, including ones in which risks are encouraged and even necessary. For Taleb, Black Swans are not merely poetic, metaphorical images that help us find philosophical meaning. Instead, they are economic disruptors, unlikely and virtually impossible to predict. As an investor and mathematician, Taleb grounds his work in mathematical theories instead of relying solely on imagination.
Taleb explores the limits of human knowledge and often-absurd attempts at explaining human history with "after-the-fact" narratives. He values unread books over read books; knowledge doesn’t minimize surprises when the unpredictable happens. Taleb questions the opinions and judgments of so-called "experts," who, according to him, often follow faulty logical assumptions to make sense of past and current events.
Socio-historical Context
The Black Swan was published in 2007. At the time, the United States was situated historically between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent invasion of Iraq and the election of Barack Obama. These events represent real-life Black Swans for distinct reasons. The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was unpredictable, and its aftermath resulted in global shifts in ideology. Obama's election symbolized a victory in civil rights, as the first African American individual was elected to the highest office in the most prosperous nation in the world.
The Black Swan was also contextualized by the recession stemming from the American financial crisis of 2007-2008. Taleb refers to market crashes throughout the book, such as the one in 1987. According to Taleb, the 1987 economic crash is more of a Mandelbrotian Gray Swan; it had a big impact on society but was easier to predict than a Black Swan. For the same reasons, the 2007-2008 financial crisis would likely also be considered a Mandelbrotian Gray Swan, as factors such as predatory loans and dubious practices by the big banks could have led to a reasonable prediction, however mathematically improbable it might have been.
Taleb does not focus on Black Swan events revolving around social or racial justice. He uses the example of Hurricane Katrina, one of the clearest examples of how the poor were disproportionately affected by an environmental disaster, to illustrate the notion that we cannot fix society simply by taking money away from something (cancer research, for instance) to invest in something else (urban infrastructure).
Related Titles
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
