Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Publisher: Random House

Comments: *Although not recent, this book has been extensively mentioned in recent month. Indeed, it has generally been assumed that there are two types of systems: fragile which is vulnerable to disruptions, and robust which is strong enough to withstand shocks. Taleb develops a third type which are resilient, and which survive shocks precisely because they do change, adapt and learn. For example, the banking system is fragile, whereas Switzerland, because it is decentralised, allows for experimentation which makes it “antifragile”.

In his earlier book, The Black Swan, Taleb shows that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, he stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events.*