When Nassim Nicholas Taleb was a teenager in Lebanon in 1975, an ethnic civil war broke out. Locals were baffled. They had thought they lived in a “stable paradise”. Once the unforeseen catastrophe began, even Taleb’s grandfather, the deputy prime minister, “did not seem to know what was going to happen any more than his driver, Mikhail”, wrote Taleb in his 2007 classic, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

In 1940, when Daniel Kahneman was a Jewish boy living in Paris, the Germans invaded France. Kahneman’s family decided to stay put. Then came the Holocaust. While the family was in hiding, Kahneman’s father could not get treatment for his diabetes, and died. Kahneman was left wondering why humans fail to foresee catastrophe.

Black Swan has just been reissued. Almost simultaneously, Michael Lewis has published The Undoing Project, about Kahneman’s intellectual collaboration with fellow psychologist Amos Tversky. Both books share an argument: people make bad judgments and terrible predictions. It’s a timely point. The risk of some kind of catastrophe — armed conflict, natural disaster, and/or democratic collapse — appears to have risen. The incoming US president has talked about first use of nuclear weapons, and seems happy to let Russia invade nearby countries. Most other big states are led by militant nationalists. Meanwhile, the polar ice caps are melting fast. How can we fallible humans avert catastrophe?