Simplistic explanations may be jolly fun and easy to articulate on a radio phone-in, but they are the last resort of the charlatan.

However, simplistic explanations, that leading bankers were greedy or hubristic, will stop us from seeing the real causes of poor decision-making.

Yet it eschews simplistic explanations for a shining fragment of individual lives.

The book focuses on the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events (outliers) and humans' tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively.