The Age of the Unthinkable

For decades we have confidently believed in our models for the way the world works. Light-touch capitalism creates wealth everywhere; spread democracy and you spread peace; terrorists need to be crushed by overwhelming force. Yet the evidence that this way of looking at things is flawed has become s [...]
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For decades we have confidently believed in our models for the way the world works. Light-touch capitalism creates wealth everywhere; spread democracy and you spread peace; terrorists need to be crushed by overwhelming force. Yet the evidence that this way of looking at things is flawed has become simply overwhelming. The credit crisis, the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, even the fall of the Soviet Union - all were unthinkable, all defied what was supposed to happen. Our models no longer work because they fail to take into account simply how totally unpredictable the world is. Just as Nassim Nicholas Taleb's bestselling book THE BLACK SWAN looked at the impact of improbable events, this book looks at how the unthinkable has come to govern everything - and how we have to embrace it or risk catastrophe.