By TJ Strydom for The Times

Many people wish Lebanese-born American thinker Nassim Taleb would redesign the world economy, rebooting it like a computer, making it more durable to shocks, panic and unforeseen tragedies.

In his new book, Antifragile, he makes it clear that he won’t, and that no one should even try.

He distinguishes between three concepts: fragility, robustness and antifragility. Anyone who has ever dropped an anvil on an iPad knows that the first is robust, and the second is fragile. Fragile things can stop working even if a small part is damaged. Robust things seem able to withstand any assault, but over time a tiny crack or a spot of rust will grow into something devastating.

The only way to stand the test of time, according to Taleb, is to be “antifragile”. It is the term he coins for “a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, shocks, stressors and volatility”.

via Handle Without Care: TJ Strydom Reviews Antifragile by Nassim Taleb | Books LIVE.