Interesting fellow...

...but his book success is derived from saying in fancy terms (with semi-mystical guru-talk) what used to be common sense: you can't predict or control everything, you should prepare/save for rainy days, and meanwhile make the most of the ones that aren't.

Last May, Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It said, among many other things, that most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous. They live in a fantasy world in which the future can be controlled by sophisticated mathematical models and elaborate risk-management systems. Bankers and economists scorned and raged at Taleb. He didn’t understand, they said. A few months later, the full global implications of the sub-prime-driven credit crunch became clear. The world banking system still teeters on the edge of meltdown. Taleb had been vindicated. “It was my greatest vindication. But to me that wasn’t a black swan; it was a white swan. I knew it would happen and I said so. It was a black swan to Ben Bernanke [the chairman of the Federal Reserve]. I wouldn’t use him to drive my car. These guys are dangerous. They’re not qualified in their own field.”

He goes on to show how randomness also undermines the effectiveness of public sector bureaucrats and their central planning tendencies. (Let's hear it for libertarian market theory!) Of course, no post about a writer dealing with improbability would be complete without a reference to this.