The Treasurer is like a boss who enthusiastically makes everyone’s life a misery with every new fad. Only this time, he is more than a decade behind after no doubt having read Nassim Taleb’s book, Antifragile.

Taleb’s earlier work, The Black Swan, pointed to ‘unknown unknowns’ – all swans in Europe were white therefore there were only white swans – until black swans were discovered in the New World.

The black swan metaphor encapsulates what Herbert Simon referred to as ‘bounded rationality’, where we make sense of the world based on our own limited sphere of existence, and often at our own expense.

The idea behind being ‘antifragile’ is to be the opposite of ‘fragile’. Fragile things break due to changing circumstances, whereas to be antifragile is to benefit from change, disorder, and even chaos like a broken bone that heals stronger after a break.

The Treasurer might have been better off reading Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway suggested that only the weak break their bones, whereas the strong die. The latter concept is much like batting in cricket – the better batsman is often caught behind because they were good enough to nick the ball, whereas the less sophisticated tail-ender’s swipe misses the ball completely.

If you are sick of all the metaphors, then you know what it is like to work under the aforementioned enthusiastic boss who has no clue but persists in making everyone’s life a misery with their half-baked application of the latest fad.

Our Treasurer is making everyone’s life a misery because we are going backwards at a rate of knots that’s taken the wind out of everyone’s sails. Except the Treasurer.

He doesn’t step in the same river twice nor is he the same man. Or so it appeared after he read Heraclitus last year.

The truth is that Canberra is not only full of black swans, but the black swan is also the emblem of the Australian Capital Territory.

If an economy is to be antifragile, which means it can adapt quickly and benefit from disorder, then such an economy is market-based. Markets can be wasteful, but history proves again and again that governments suck at planning the economy. Markets drive innovation and enable supply to match demand, especially over time.

If the Treasurer is going to make our economy antifragile, then he needs to become less involved in it.

Instead, we have superannuation funds where trillions of dollars of our retirement funds are tied up and likely to be used for renewable energy projects or social housing if Labor gets another crack at governing.

We have a housing market that is being swamped by government trying to build social housing and failing to do so while messing up the market.

We have poles and wires ripping up prime agricultural land and destroying the retirement prospects of farmers and landholders to connect government-funded renewables projects. Nuclear is not even allowed to compete in the mix because it remains banned.

Faith in the Bureau of Meteorology (‘don’t call us the BOM’) and the CSIRO is at an all-time low and we have a Productivity Commission that appears to be supporting Labor’s socialisation of industry agenda.

In the meantime, a box of sliced cheese that cost $3.99 before the Albanese government was elected now costs $7.99. Not to mention that any spare cash anybody had is now going straight to the banks – not as savings but in extra interest payments.

The economy couldn’t be worse in such otherwise good times.

In the 1980s and 90s, New Zealand had Rogernomics and Australia had economic rationalism.

Today, we have that annoying boss getting in the way of us enjoying the fruits of our labour.

We might call this type of economy ‘enthusiastic faddishism’.

There is an old army myth about the different kinds of leaders. Smart and lazy are considered the best because they will find the easiest way to achieve a goal. Smart and industrious are good for complex planning work. Stupid and lazy are good for nothing.

But the worst kind is stupid and industrious. The kind that enthusiastically run around with the latest fad while not having a clue. They work hard at messing up everybody’s livelihoods.

Unfortunately, the latter kind are like black swans in Canberra. They’re everywhere.

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