Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

A book on how certain systems really benefit from chaos from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the best-selling author of The Black Swan and one of the modern world's leading thinkers.

Taleb identified an issue in The Black Swan, and in Antifragile he provides a conclusive answer—namely, how to profit from chaos and disorder while safeguarding against vulnerabilities and unfavourable circumstances. Because what he refers to as the "antifragile" is more resilient than robust because it gains strength from stress, uncertainty, and hardship in the same way as human bones do.

By turning uncertainty into something desirable, Taleb suggests that things be constructed in an antifragile way. Antifragile is a very ambitious and diverse project that offers a guide on how to survive and act in a world that we don't fully comprehend and is too unpredictable for us to attempt to comprehend. Whoever is not antifragile will end up dead. Why is debt bad for you, why is the city state preferable to the nation state, and why is almost everything in the contemporary world doomed to fail? Innovation, health, biology, medicine, choices in life, politics, foreign policy, urban planning, conflict, individual finances, and economic systems are all topics covered in the book. The voice and recipes of ancient knowledge from Greek, Roman, Phoenician, and Mediaeval sources resound throughout.