Fragility-Robustness-Antifragility Triad

Never shout in French—Ms. Bré gains in respect—Black Swan territory

In the fall of 2009, I found myself in Korea with a collection of suit-and-tie-wearing hotshots. On a panel sat one Takatoshi Kato, then the deputy managing director of a powerful international institution. Before the panel discussion, he gave us a rapid PowerPoint presentation showing his and his department’s economic projections for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014.

These were the days before I decided to climb up the mountain, speak slowly and in a priestly tone, and try shaming people rather than insulting them. Listening to Kato’s presentation, I could not control myself and flew into a rage in front of two thousand Koreans—I was so angry that I almost started shouting in French, forgetting that I was in Korea. I ran to the podium and told the audience that the next time someone in a suit and tie gave them projections for some dates in the future, they should ask him to show what he had projected in the past—in this case, what he had been forecasting for 2008 and 2009 (the crisis years) two to five years earlier, in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. They would then verify that Highly Venerable Kato-san and his colleagues are, to put it mildly, not very good at this predictionizing business. And it is not just Mr. Kato: our track record in figuring out significant rare events in politics and economics is not close to zero; it is zero. I improvised, on the spot, my solution. We can’t put all false predictors in jail; we can’t stop people from asking for predictions; we can’t tell people not to hire the next person who makes promises about the future. “All I want is to live in a world in which predictions such as those by Mr. Kato do not harm you. And such a world has unique attributes: robustness.”

The idea of proposing the Triad was born there and then as an answer to my frustration: Fragility-Robustness-Antifragility as a replacement for predictive methods.