Creative Destruction and Black Swan Theory, by David Barrows, API

A colleague asked an important question with respect to "momentous changes." I was unable to discover specific literature with respect to "momentous changes." However, I identified Black Swan events and Creative Destruction as proxies. A brief description follows.

1. Creative destruction (German: schöpferische Zerstörung) is a concept in economics since the 1950s is the most readily identified with the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter who derived it from the work of Karl Marx and popularized it as a theory of economic innovation and the business cycle. It is also sometimes known as Schumpeter's gale.

According to Schumpeter, the "gale of creative destruction" describes the "process of industrial mutation that continuously revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one". In Marxian economic theory, the concept refers more broadly to the linked processes of the accumulation and annihilation of wealth under capitalism.

The German sociologist Werner Sombart has been credited with the first use of these terms in his work Krieg und Kapitalismus (War and Capitalism, 1913).

2.  Black Swan Theory is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on an ancient saying that presumed black swans did not exist – a saying that became reinterpreted to teach a different lesson after they were discovered in Australia.

The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, starting in 2001, to explain: The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.

The non-computability of the probability of consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).

The psychological biases confound people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and a rare event's massive role in historical affairs.

Taleb's "black swan theory" refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.