FORTUNE — How did Switzerland become the most stable country in history? Its currency, unlike ours, keeps hitting new highs post-crisis, yet Switzerland doesn’t have a large central bank working behind the scenes. For that matter, it doesn’t have much of a central government. In Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, Nassim Taleb jokes that the average Swiss citizen can name the presidents of France and the United States before they can name their own.

It turns out Switzerland perfectly captures Taleb’s idea of antifragility — the concept that certain things grow stronger with shock and turmoil, as opposed to fragile things, which just break down.

Taleb argues that Switzerland is a model of stability precisely because it doesn’t have a big central bank or national government. Instead, its dozens of sovereign mini-states squabble and fight constantly. This turmoil actually makes the country stronger because the Swiss get small problems out of the way before they can metastasize into something bigger like, say, a fiscal cliff.

via Antifragility: How disorder makes us stronger – Fortune Features.