BANKS should be more like cats than washing machines. So suggests Nassim Taleb, ex-trader and controversial author of The Black Swan, who has a new book out in time for Christmas. What he means is that living things – cats, economists, bankers – display a property that even our best-designed machinery lacks: a quality that he names antifragility, fragility’s true opposite.

To be antifragile, it is not enough to be robust and able to resist a few knocks. Something antifragile is actually better under pressure: self-healing, it treats damage as a source of data, from which it learns and adapts, ending up stronger than before. Perhaps that’s why cats are said to have nine lives.

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HatTip to Dave Lull