Western countries are increasingly displaying symptoms of instability as described by Nassim Taleb, the author of the The Black Swan, ever since the publication of an essay written with Gregory Treverton entitled “The Calm Before the Storm.”
The piece was published in the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs – the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In their essay, Taleb and Treverton highlight five characteristics that could help identify states that – while appearing stable on the surface – may actually be quite fragile.
“Fragility”, they write, “is aversion to disorder”. Under this criterion they view Italy as a stable state.
The five characteristics they view as major factors in instability are:
– centralised decision making,
– lack of economic diversity
– high levels of debt and leverage
– absence of political variability
– lack of track record in surviving shocks
