The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recogn… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed — but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.

Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy.

...and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen.

The contagious creation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century led to what we saw with the two world wars and their sequels.