Taleb chose this bird-centric title because until Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh arrived in Australia in 1697 and encountered black swans, Europe believed that all swans were white.
His discovery forced Europeans to revise what had been an obvious and accepted belief.
Taleb's title reminds readers that just because you have never seen a black swan, doesn't mean that there are no black swans.
It takes an unusual thinker to write a best-selling book predicated on the head-scratching concept that unlikely events seem impossible when they lie in the unknown or in the future, but after they occur, become a part of our readily-accepted reality.
Taleb has both the personal and professional credentials to delve into such a premise.
Born in Lebanon in 1960, he holds a master's in business administration from Wharton, a Ph.
D.
from the University of Paris and is serving as the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Taleb was founder of Empirica LLC, a corporation with interests in hedge funds and a research laboratory in London.
At 25, he became chief currency derivatives trader for Banque Indosuez, and has also served as a managing director and head trader at Union Bank of Switzerland.
In Taleb's words, "It is easy to see that life is the cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks.
It is not so hard to identify the role of Black Swans from your armchair ...
Look into your own existence, count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent.
Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate.
How often did these things occur according to plan?" As examples of Black Swans, Taleb offers events such as these to remind us that what we don't know can be far more relevant than what we do know:
Taleb is surprisingly positive about America's place in the global economy, and writes: "It so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than (older) nations of museum-goers and equation solvers.
- The internal combustion engine
- World Wars I and II
- The Cuban Revolution
- The personal computer
- 1990's internet stock bubble
- The Harry Potter phenomenon, which turned a mother on welfare into a billionaire
- 9/11
It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error.
And globalization has allowed the United States to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the production of concepts and ideas.
There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike, Dell, and Boeing can get paid for just thinking, organizing and leveraging their know-how and ideas while subcontracted factories in developing countries do the grunt work, and engineers in cultured and mathematical states do the noncreative technical grind.
The American economy has leveraged itself heavily on the idea generation, which explains why losing manufacturing jobs can be coupled with a rising standard of living.
" According to Taleb, unlike earlier cultures, Americans haven't learned to be afraid of failure.
We're willing to trade the possibility of failure for the chance at a big upside.
Bucking the conventional wisdom of most business books, The Black Swan suggests that whatever future success we may enjoy will most likely have more to do with unexpected factors than with precise planning and prediction of outcomes.