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Under pressure:
the benefits of
being anti-fragile
Why shock and stress, less commonly
known as anti-fragility, are good for
governments, societies and businesses
When he wrote Black Swan about highly improbable and unpredictable events that have a major
impact on society, American Lebanese thinker, writer and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb did not just
forecast the 2008 financial crisis. He also profited from the downturn by creating an investment
portfolio based on the theories contained in his book.
That Taleb saw the economic downturn coming, and made money from it, shows he is a man worth
listening to. His follow-up book Anti-Fragile: How to live in a world we don’t understand, sums up
his thinking about how businesses, societies and individuals can best live and, crucially, thrive in an
uncertain world.
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Small mistakes can
make a system more
robust while large
ones can destroy it
What does Taleb mean by the term anti-fragile?
Taleb coined the term because there was no existing antonym for “fragile,” and
he saw it as a vital concept that was all but missing from modern discourse.
“There is a mathematical term for it — long convexity — but there is no English
word for it,” Taleb says.
“When you send a package by mail you write ‘fragile’ on it. The opposite would
read ‘please mishandle.’ In other words, the package gains from mishandling,
which is a crucial distinction from mere robustness,” Taleb says.
Anti-fragility describes how systems benefit from shocks, rather than merely
survive them. A mythical analogy is that of the Hydra, a serpent that grows
back two heads every time one is chopped off. Stress and uncertainty can make
some systems stronger, such as the human body, which strengthens under small
stresses and atrophies without them.
What is the book’s big message?
Taleb argues that what might be seen as our intuitive knowledge of how things
work in the world — essentially that nothing is certain and that mistakes happen —
is undermined by modern ideas. This is particularly true of elaborate risk models,
which will be based on faulty assumptions, because by definition they cannot
properly take account of the existence of chaos and uncertainty.
A more fruitful approach is to measure how fragile a system is, Taleb says. “It is
far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an
event that may harm it.”
Anti-fragile systems, on the other hand, “gain from prediction errors in the
long run,” writes Taleb. “We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to
programmed design, university research and bureaucratic funding, but there
is compelling evidence to show that this is an illusion, which I call ‘lecturing the
birds to fly’.”
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How does this theory apply to the world of economics,
government and big business?
Small mistakes can make a system more robust while large
ones can destroy it, Taleb says, so top-down, optimizedsystems are inherently fragile. If you let systems develop
on their own they will be anti-fragile. Nature and evolution
work in the same way.
Would-be innovators and R&D departments should also take
note. “Technology is the result of anti-fragility, exploited by
risk takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with
nerd-driven design confined to the backstage,” he says.
What systems, types of businesses and individuals does
Taleb describe as fragile and anti-fragile?
Examples of fragile systems include the New York banking
system, directed research, the centralized nation-state
and debt. Taleb lists Silicon Valley, trial and error tinkering,
coalitions of city states and venture capital as anti-fragile.
When discussing how anti-fragility relates to finance,
medicine, health, governments, regulators, education,
urbanism and law, Taleb says: “If anti-fragility is the
property of natural and complex systems that have
survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness
and stressors will harm them.
“We have been fragilizing the economy our health,
political life, education, almost everything by suppressing
randomness and volatility. This is the tragedy of modernity:
as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to
help are often hurting us the most.” 
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