The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

a natural tendency to organize themselves around an extremely concentrated architecture: a few nodes are extremely connected; others barely so. The distribution of these connections has a scalable structure of the kind we will discuss in Chapters 15 and 16. Concentration of this kind is not limited to the Internet; it appears in social life (a small number of people are connected to others), in electricity grids, in communications networks. This seems to make networks more robust: random insults to most parts of the network will not be consequential since they are likely to hit a poorly connected spot. But it also makes networks more vulnerable to Black Swans. Just consider what would happen if there is a problem with a major node. The electricity blackout experienced in the northeastern United States during August 2003, with its consequential mayhem, is a perfect example of what could take place if one of the big banks went under today.