The sun shone and tens of thousands of book lovers tucked into everything from an audience with Roger Moore and a discussion of Brideshead Revisited to an appearance by the Gruffalo.

But the hottest tickets at the opening weekend of The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival were for anything to do with the financial crisis.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb arrived as the newly crowned sage of Wall Street thanks to his bestselling book of economics and philosophy, The Black Swan, which has become a key text for understanding the credit crunch.

He played to a packed tent, as did Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, whose profile has risen as fast as the stock market has fallen.

And in a special festival edition of Start the Week, broadcast on Radio 4 this morning, the historian Simon Schama found a silver lining in the doom clouds, saying that the election of Barack Obama – “because that’s what’s going to happen” – could have the same galvanising effect as Franklin D. Roosevelt had when he won in 1932 and started the fightback against the Great Depression.

But it was Taleb who offered the most provocative critique of our economic plight. A former derivatives trader who made $40 million from shorting the market on Black Monday in 1987, the Lebanese-born writer is now Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts. He is described as the most sought-after thinker in the world today, thanks to The Black Swan and his previous book Fooled by Randomness, and charges up to $60,000 £35,000) a time for lectures.

Taleb’s thesis is that the world we live in “is not the world we think we live in”, that history and society are moulded, far more than we realise, by cataclysmic, unpredictable events, which he calls “Black Swans”.

“We live in a world we don’t understand”, he said. The only way to deal with this is to behave accordingly.

Taleb believes economists and central bankers created a fool’s paradise with an “illusion of control” that encouraged reckless risk-taking. “Economists can’t imagine the world doing crazy things but the world is crazy, crazier than our imagination.”

He damns the City as “dull people sitting on a pile of dynamite”.

He doesn’t have a solution to the crisis, but his recipe for personal success is simple: “Open yourself up to positive Black Swans. Try to exploit the random texture of the world.”

Taleb’s other dictum should win an even bigger following. “No one should work more than 50 minutes a day,” he said, after the talk. “If I work for more than that my income drops. Humans are good at enjoying themselves.”

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