Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Few realize that we are moving into the far more uneven distribution of 99/1 across many things that used to be 80/20: 99 percent of Internet traffic is attributable to less than 1 percent of sites, 99 percent of book sales come from less than 1 percent of authors … and I need to stop because numbers are emotionally stirring. Almost everything contemporary has winner-take-all effects, which includes sources of harm and benefits. Accordingly, as I will show, 1 percent modification of systems can lower fragility (or increase antifragility) by about 99 percent—and all it takes is a few steps, very few steps, often at low cost, to make things better and safer.