Randomness

I have finished listening to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan. My understanding on using the Gaussian method to describe social sciences like economics has been altered forever. Believe me I spent quite a lot of time in Graduate School learning and reading about the beauty of "the bell curve" to describe random variables. Although it was elegant, pure and tight in describing some systems I feel I should have been more skeptical of its inference capabilities. I also think my professors should have spent more time describing situations where it does not work which is any random variable that is derived through aggregation for example total stock returns from a portfolio of stocks, wealth, stock prices, interest rates, currencies exchange rates, i.e. all macroeconomic indicators. When I think about this I am not sure if the above variables are random at all, as they all have some form of dependency.