An economic history of the world, concentrating on the origins of unequal outcomes and focusing on the role of culture.

Taleb explains his ideas regarding ‘Black Swans’, highly unlikely and largely unforeseen random events that nevertheless have significant impact. Taleb maintains that Black Swans dominate the history of the human race but are largely ignored due to a combination of psychological biases and what he dismissively refers to as “Platonic” theories like the classical theory of statistics centered around the Gaussian distribution.

It’s a lot to digest but NNT, as he styles himself, is a very entertaining and largely lucid writer. I would say he raises far more questions than he answers but the book is no worse for that and may be one of his central points — we just don’t know nearly as much as we think we do.