In 1900 something like 40% of the American workforce worked on farms. Today it's around 2%.

Farming is a fragile profession? It's been around for thousands of years!

I'd bet that the only 'job' Taleb would say was antifragile would be something like entrepreneurship.

He'd probably have to agree that writing smart-arse books about economics is a durable career.

I don't know about that. My model of Taleb has him pointing out the many dangers of entrepreneurship, and the myriad biases which lead people to underestimate the risks of starting a business--survivorship bias et all.

Actually, I'm kind of wrong -- but kind of right. Pg. 80 says "You are the source of our anti-fragility" in regards to entrepreneurs. Basically it's lots of small fragililities which tend to create anti-fragility - hundreds of entrepreneurs trying to create businesses and failing over and over again, causes economic growth.

If you are able to live cheaply, and learn a lot doing something risky, you are being anti-fragile.

I find it ironic that "anti-fragile" or robust institutions can only be classified as such post black swan.

Every job is fragile given the right technological advance.

Thanks for turning me on to Taleb.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e...

Having watched the first few minutes of the above, I think he means his "antifragility" to be an attribute of economic and political systems, not of individual jobs or even whole occupations. E.g., he says that, in order for the restaurant business to be at least robust and maybe even antifragile, individual restaurants must be allowed to be fragile. It gets more interesting when he turns to the banking business ...

Oh great, yet another buzzword that people will throw around instead of actually discussing things.

That's not a buzz word. It's a word with an explicit definition.

Think for yourself.

No!