Book review: Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Allen Lane

The core idea behind this book is simple and enticing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb divides the world and all that's in it (people, things, institutions, ways of life) into three categories: the fragile, the robust and the antifragile.

You are fragile if you avoid disruption for fear of the mess they might make of your life. You are robust if you can stand up to shocks without flinching and without changing who you are. But you are antifragile if shocks and disruptions make you stronger and more creative, better able to adapt to each new challenge that you face.

If the idea is nice and neat, however, the book that houses it is just the opposite. It is a big, baggy, sprawling mess. Taleb seems to have decided not just to explain his idea but also to exemplify it. One of his bugbears is the fragility of most of what passes for "knowledge" - especially the kind produced by academics - which he thinks is so hung up on order and completeness that it falls apart at the first breath of disruption. So he has gone for deliberate disorder: Antifragile jumps around from aphorism to anecdote to technical analysis, interspersed with a certain amount of hectoring encouragement to the reader to keep up.

There are two problems with this. First, the book is hard going. Everything is taken to link to everything else but nothing is followed through. Taleb despises mere "theorists" but still aspires to produce a theory of everything. So we get lots of personal reminiscences buttressed by the ideas of the few thinkers he respects, almost all of whom happen to be his friends. The result is both solipsistic and ultimately dispiriting.