and want a simple selection criterion. The criterion this series offered
was one book by a Nobel winner in literature every year—a simple
way to build the ultimate library. The series was supposed to be updated
every year, but I presume the company went out of business in the eighties.
I feel a pang every time I look at these volumes: Do you hear much
today about Sully Prudhomme (the first recipient), Pearl Buck (an American
woman), Romain Rolland, Anatole France (the last two were the most
famous French authors of their generations), St. John Perse, Roger Martin
du Gard, or Frédéric Mistral?
FROM MEDIOCRISTAN TO E X T R E M I S T A N , AND BACK 2 2 3
The Long Tail
I have said that nobody is safe in Extremistan. This has a converse: nobody
is threatened with complete extinction either. Our current environment
allows the little guy to bide his time in the antechamber of
success—as long as there is life, there is hope.
This idea was recently revived by Chris Anderson, one of a very few
who get the point that the dynamics of fractal concentration has another
layer of randomness. He packaged it with his idea of the "long tail,"
about which in a moment. Anderson is lucky not to be a professional statistician
(people who have had the misfortune of going through conventional
statistical training think we live in Mediocristan). He was able to
take a fresh look at the dynamics of the world.
True, the Web produces acute concentration. A large number of users
visit just a few sites, such as Google, which, at the time of this writing, has
total market dominance. At no time in history has a company grown so
dominant so quickly—Google can service people from Nicaragua to southwestern
Mongolia to the American West Coast, without having to worry
about phone operators, shipping, delivery, and manufacturing. This is the
ultimate winner-take-all case study.
People forget, though, that before Google, Alta Vista dominated the
search-engine market. I am prepared to revise the Google metaphor by replacing
it with a new name for future editions of this book.
What Anderson saw is that the Web causes something in addition to
concentration. The Web enables the formation of a reservoir of proto-
Googles waiting in the background. It also promotes the inverse Google,
that is, it allows people with a technical specialty to find a small, stable audience.
Recall the role of the Web in Yevgenia Krasnova's success. Thanks to
the Internet, she was able to bypass conventional publishers. Her publisher
with the pink glasses would not even have been in business had it
not been for the Web. Let's assume that Amazon.com does not exist, and
that you have written a sophisticated book. Odds are that a very small
bookstore that carries only 5,000 volumes will not be interested in letting
your "beautifully crafted prose" occupy premium shelf space. And the
megabookstore, such as the average American Barnes & Noble, might
stock 130,000 volumes, which is still not sufficient to accommodate marginal
titles. So your work is stillborn.
Not so with Web vendors. A Web bookstore can carry a near-infinite
2 2 4 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN
number of books since it need not have them physically in inventory. Actually,
nobody needs to have them physically in inventory since they can
remain in digital form until they are needed in print, an emerging business
called print-on-demand.
So as the author of this little book, you can sit there, bide your time, be
available in search engines, and perhaps benefit from an occasional epidemic.
In fact, the quality of readership has improved markedly over the
past few years thanks to the availability of these more sophisticated
books. This is a fertile environment for diversity.*
Plenty of people have called me to discuss the idea of the long tail,
which seems to be the exact opposite of the concentration implied by scalability.
The long tail implies that the small guys, collectively, should control
a large segment of culture and commerce, thanks to the niches and
subspecialties that can now survive thanks to the Internet. But, strangely,
it can also imply a large measure of inequality: a large base of small guys
and a very small number of supergiants, together representing a share of
the world's culture—with some of the small guys, on occasion, rising to
knock out the winners. (This is the "double tail": a large tail of the small
guys, a small tail of the big guys.)
The role of the long tail is fundamental in changing the dynamics of
success, destabilizing the well-seated winner, and bringing about another
winner. In a snapshot this will always be Extremistan, always ruled by the
concentration of type-2 randomness; but it will be an ever-changing Extremistan.
The long tail's contribution is not yet numerical; it is still confined to
the Web and its small-scale online commerce. But consider how the long
tail could affect the future of culture, information, and political life. It
could free us from the dominant political parties, from the academic system,
from the clusters of the press—anything that is currently in the hands
of ossified, conceited, and self-serving authority. The long tail will help
foster cognitive diversity. One highlight of the year 2006 was to find in my
* The Web's bottom-up feature is also making book reviewers more accountable.
While writers were helpless and vulnerable to the arbitrariness of book reviews,
which can distort their messages and, thanks to the confirmation bias, expose
small irrelevant weak points in their text, they now have a much stronger hand. In
place of the moaning letter to the editor, they can simply post their review of a review
on the Web. If attacked ad hominem, they can reply ad hominem and go directly
after the credibility of the reviewer, making sure that their statement shows
rapidly in an Internet search or on Wikipedia, the bottom-up encyclopedia.
F R O M M E D I O C R I S T A N T O E X T R E M I S T A N , A N D B A C K 2 25
mailbox a draft manuscript of a book called Cognitive Diversity: How
Our Individual Differences Produce Collective Benefits, by Scott Page.
Page examines the effects of cognitive diversity on problem solving and
shows how variability in views and methods acts like an engine for tinkering.
It works like evolution. By subverting the big structures we also get
rid of the Platonified one way of doing things—in the end, the bottom-up
theory-free empiricist should prevail.
In sum, the long tail is a by-product of Extremistan that makes it somewhat
less unfair: the world is made no less unfair for the little guy, but it
now becomes extremely unfair for the big man. Nobody is truly established.
The little guy is very subversive.
Na?ve Globalization
We are gliding into disorder, but not necessarily bad disorder. This implies
that we will see more periods of calm and stability, with most problems
concentrated into a small number of Black Swans.
Consider the nature of past wars. The twentieth century was not the
deadliest (in percentage of the total population), but it brought something
new: the beginning of the Extremistan warfare—a small probability of a
conflict degenerating into total decimation of the human race, a conflict
from which nobody is safe anywhere.
A similar effect is taking place in economic life. I spoke about globalization
in Chapter 3; it is here, but it is not all for the good: it creates interlocking
fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of
stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never
lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial institutions
have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all
banks are now interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic,
incestuous, bureaucratic banks (often Gaussianized in their risk
measurement)—when one falls, they all fall.* The increased concentration
* As if we did not have enough problems, banks are now more vulnerable to the
Black Swan and the ludic fallacy than ever before with "scientists" among their
staff taking care of exposures. The giant firm J . P. Morgan put the entire world at
risk by introducing in the nineties RiskMetrics, a phony method aiming at managing
people's risks, causing the generalized use of the ludic fallacy, and bringing Dr.
Johns into power in place of the skeptical Fat Tonys. (A related method called
"Value-at-Risk," which relies on the quantitative measurement of risk, has been
spreading.) Likewise, the government-sponsored institution Fanny Mae, when I
look at their risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the
2 2 6 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN
slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events
"unlikely."
among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely,
but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard.
We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied
lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble
one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they
occur . . . I shiver at the thought. I rephrase here: we will have fewer but
more severe crises. The rarer the event, the less we know about its odds. It
mean that we know less and less about the possibility of a crisis.
And we have some idea how such a crisis would happen. A network is
an assemblage of elements called nodes that are somehow connected to
one another by a link; the world's airports constitute a network, as does
the World Wide Web, as do social connections and electricity grids. There
is a branch of research called "network theory" that studies the organization
of such networks and the links between their nodes, with such researchers
as Duncan Watts, Steven Strogatz, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, and
many more. They all understand Extremistan mathematics and the inadequacy
of the Gaussian bell curve. They have uncovered the following
property of networks: there is a concentration among a few nodes that
serve as central connections. Networks have 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.
But banks are in a far worse situation than the Internet. The financial
industry has no significant long tail! We would be far better off if there
were a different ecology, in which financial institutions went bust on occasion
and were rapidly replaced by new ones, thus mirroring the diversity
F R O M M E D I O C R I S T A N T O E X T R E M I S T A N , A N D B A C K 2 27
of Internet businesses and the resilience of the Internet economy. Or if
there were a long tail of government officiais and civil servants coming to
reinvigorate bureaucracies.
REVERSALS AWAY FROM EXTREMISTAN
There is, inevitably, a mounting tension between our society, full of concentration,
and our classical idea of aurea mediocritas, the golden mean,
so it is conceivable that efforts may be made to reverse such concentration.
We live in a society of one person, one vote, where progressive taxes have
been enacted precisely to weaken the winners. Indeed, the rules of society
can be easily rewritten by those at the bottom of the pyramid to prevent
concentration from hurting them. But it does not require voting to do so—
religion could soften the problem. Consider that before Christianity, in
many societies the powerful had many wives, thus preventing those at the
bottom from accessing wombs, a condition that is not too different from
the reproductive exclusivity of alpha males in many species. But Christianity
reversed this, thanks to the one man-one woman rule. Later, Islam
came to limit the number of wives to four. Judaism, which had been polygenic,
became monogamous in the Middle Ages. One can say that such a
strategy has been successful—the institution of tightly monogamous marriage
(with no official concubine, as in the Greco-Roman days), even when
practiced the "French way," provides social stability since there is no pool
of angry, sexually deprived men at the bottom fomenting a revolution just
so they can have the chance to mate.
But I find the emphasis on economic inequality, at the expense of other
types of inequality, extremely bothersome. Fairness is not exclusively an
economic matter; it becomes less and less so when we are satisfying our
basic material needs. It is pecking order that matters! The superstars will
always be there. The Soviets may have flattened the economic structure,
but they encouraged their own brand of iibermensch. What is poorly understood,
or denied (owing to its unsettling implications), is the absence of
a role for the average in intellectual production. The disproportionate
share of the very few in intellectual influence is even more unsettling than
the unequal distribution of wealth—unsettling because, unlike the income
gap, no social policy can eliminate it. Communism could conceal or compress
income discrepancies, but it could not eliminate the superstar system
in intellectual life.
It has even been shown, by Michael Marmot of the Whitehall Studies,
2 2 8 THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN
that those at the top of the pecking order live longer, even when adjusting
