If you liked Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb then I got good news for you: he currently writes a new book on Antifragility.
What is Antifragility? Well, I guess you know what fragile means. Think about a glass to drink water. You can put stress on it, put it on a table a 100 times. Drop it once from 4 feets - it breaks. Thats fragile: things that break under a certain level of stress but do not change on less stress.
What Nassim Taleb calls antifragility is a little different. It means that put under stress, a thing would improve. So the glass would have to become stronger each time you put it on the table in order to be antifragile. And if you put it on the table often enough, finally it might be able to withstand a larger drop.
Now you think: this concept is irrelevant. No glass becomes stronger by putting it on a table. But think about your muscles. How do you train them? You stress them, they got hurt, even injured at a micro-level, but they get stronger by exactly this stress and next time you can run faster, lift more weights, push harder. Antifragile.
And the economy? Wasn't the original concept that each failure of a company makes the whole system gets stronger? That the survival of the fittest would lead to a stronger species?
Nassim Talebs book will not be out for sale till summer 2012. But you can get a 60 min interview with him on this topic at Econtalk.
It seems that the whole concept of "failure of a company = the whole system profits by learning from it and getting stronger" contains a lot of wishful thinking. But then I'm not an expert.
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