The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Predicting and explaining:see thorn (1993).

Poincaré:the three body problem can be found in Barrow-Green (1996), Rollet (2005), and Galison (2003). On Einstein, Pais (1982). More recent revelations in Hladik (2004).

Billiard balls:berry (1978) and Pisarenko and Sornette (2004).

Very general discussion on “complexity”:benkirane (2002), scheps (1996), and ruelle (1991). For limits, Barrow (1998).

Hayek:see www.nobel.se. See Hayek (1945, 1994). Is it that mechanisms do not correct themselves from railing by influential people, but either by mortality of the operators, or something even more severe, by being put out of business? Alas, because of contagion, there seems to be little logic to how matters improve; luck plays a part in how soft sciences evolve. See Ormerod (2006) for network effects in “intellectuals and socialism” and the power-law distribution in influence owing to the scale-free aspect of the connections—and the consequential arbitrariness. Hayek seems to have been a prisoner of Weber’s old differentiation between Natur-Wissenschaften and Geistes Wissenschaften—but thankfully not Popper.

Insularity of economists:pieters and baumgartner (2002). one good aspect of the insularity of economists is that they can insult me all they want without any consequence: it appears that only economists read other economists (so they can write papers for other economists to read). For a more general case, see Wallerstein (1999). Note that Braudel fought “economic history.” It was history.

Economics as religion:nelson (2001) and keen (2001). for methodology, see Blaug (1992). For high priests and lowly philosophers, see Boettke, Coyne, and Leeson (2006). Note that the works of Gary Becker and the Platonists of the Chicago School are all marred by the confirmation bias: Becker is quick to show you situations in which people are moved by economic incentives, but does not show you cases (vastly more numerous) in which people don’t care about such materialistic incentives.

The smartest book I’ve seen in economics is Gave et al. (2005) since it transcends the constructed categories in academic economic discourse (one of the authors is the journalist Anatole Kaletsky).

General theory:this fact has not deterred “general theorists.” One hotshot of the Pla-tonifying variety explained to me during a long plane ride from Geneva to New York that the ideas of Kahneman and his colleagues must be rejected because they do not allow us to develop a general equilibrium theory, producing “time-inconsistent preferences.” For a minute I thought he was joking: he blamed the psychologists’ ideas and human incoherence for interfering with his ability to build his Platonic model.

Samuelson:for his optimization, see Samuelson (1983). Also Stiglitz (1994).

Plato’s dogma on body symmetry:“athenian stranger to cleinias: in that the right and left hand are supposed to be by nature differently suited for our various uses of them; whereas no difference is found in the use of the feet and the lower limbs; but in the use of the hands we are, as it were, maimed by the folly of nurses and mothers; for although our several limbs are by nature balanced, we create a difference in them by bad habit,” in Plato’s Laws. See McManus (2002).

Drug companies:other such firms, I was told, are run by commercial persons who tell researchers where they find a “market need” and ask them to “invent” drugs and cures accordingly—which accords with the methods of the dangerously misleading Wall Street security analysts. They formulate projections as if they know what they are going to find.

Models of the returns on innovations:sornette and zajdenweber (1999) and Silverberg and Verspagen (2005).

Evolution on a short leash:dennet (2003) and stanovich and West (2000).

Montaigne:we don’t get much from the biographies of a personal essayist; some information in Frame (1965) and Zweig (1960).

Projectibility and thegrueparadox:see goodman (1955). see also an application (or perhaps misapplication) in King and Zheng (2005).

Constructionism:see berger and Luckmann (1966) and Hacking (1999).