The Black Elephant is a combination of two common phrases.
The “elephant sitting in the room” is the thing which everybody knows is important but nobody will talk about. It is a taboo.
The “black swan” is an extreme or unlikely event which shreds prior risk management strategies.
A “black elephant” – the phrase came out of an Institute for Collapsonomics meeting with @dougald, @freecloud, @hexayurt, @LloydDavis & @MikeBennet – is an event which is extremely likely and widely predicted by experts, but people attempt to pass it off as a black swan when it finally happens. Usually the experts who had predicted the event – from the economic crisis to pandemic flu – go from being marginalized to being lionized when the problem finally rears its head.
Right now, our society is littered with black elephants. Can you name yours?
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The inevitable acquisition and subsequent deployment of a thermonuclear device by religious extremist.
The illusion of scarcity.
I take that back. It’s an elephant, but not a black one.
Did you mean lionized or demonized, by the way? Because the latter certainly seems the more usual outcome – at least in the realm of economics.
The release of “terminator” seed genes into the wild, resulting in the end of agriculture and the mass starvation of billions of people.
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