Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born in Lebanon in 1960) is an essayist, researcher and former financial trader of Lebanese origin who holds American citizenship. He describes himself as a "skeptical empiricist". His work belongs to a line of skeptical thinkers that runs from Sextus Empiricus and Montaigne to David Hume, and it centres on randomness, probability and uncertainty. It matters because it challenges the confidence that economists, financiers and scientists place in rational explanations built from past data, which he believes underestimate the role of chance.

He was born into a Lebanese Greek Orthodox family with a long record in politics and business, and his education was largely French. He attended the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais in Beirut and studied at the University of Paris. He later earned an MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The Lebanese civil war reduced his family's political prominence and wealth. For years he worked as a derivatives trader for banks in New York and Europe, and he ran the fund Empirica Capital. He then turned to writing and teaching, and since 2008 he has taught at New York University.

His central work is Incerto, a five-volume series on uncertainty. In Fooled by Randomness (2001) he shows how chance misleads even educated people, who credit skill for outcomes that often owe more to luck. The Black Swan (2007) deals with rare, high-impact events that seem explicable only after they happen. The Bed of Procrustes (2010) collects aphorisms on knowledge. Antifragile (2012) describes systems that gain from disorder. Skin in the Game (2018) examines the asymmetries between those who take risks and those who bear their consequences. His critique targets the ludic fallacy, the mistake of treating the real world as a game of chance with probabilities set in advance, and the Platonic habit of favouring mathematical purity over messy data. In its place he defends robust strategies, such as avoiding middling risks and combining extremes.

His influence is felt in finance, risk management and public debate about the fragility of institutions. The Black Swan sold close to three million copies and is credited with anticipating the 2008 financial crisis. He is also a sharp critic of economic theory and of universities as producers of knowledge, and he has called for the Nobel Prize in Economics to be discontinued.