Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

one of the my personal measures of how good a book is, is whether or not I find myself compelled to read it with a pencil in hand making margin notes. on this measure alone this book warrants 5 stars. you find yourself continually asking, “really?” and then checking things out in Wikipedia. where you might think perhaps NNT was stretching for effect you find … no, actually he was dead on. this book has no shortage of NNT diatribes and rants and he will dive into more Ancient Greek references than the reader might have a tolerance for.

this is the (more or less) practical follow up to the black swan. NNT provides some practical guidance as to how at a personal level and at a social level we should be proactively seeking to keep risks and exposure small. he cogently argues that we need to be aligning objectives and behaviors for regulators and institutions for the greater social good. be highly distrustful of those who won’t put their personal money where their mouths are and drive our governmental institutions to eliminate the tacit complicity that exists between civil servants looking for a private sector payoff and industries.

NNT does get pointed in his personal attacks/critiques of several prominent folks for exploiting the loopholes in the regulatory environment and their complicity in the erosion of practical protections.