For new firms and technologies to emerge, old ones had to die. There is a ‘perennial gale of creative destruction’. Or, as Nassim Taleb puts it, for the economy to be antifragile (strengthened by running risks), individual firms must be fragile. The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers.
