IS THE JAPANESE EARTHQUAKE A BLACK SWAN?

IS THE JAPANESE EARTHQUAKE A BLACK SWAN? I have posted a number of times on Nassim Taleb’s concept of the black swan. Was the Japanese earthquake a black swan? John Kay points out in this post that it is not. The test he applies for a black swan is whether the likelihood of an event is “a question that you can sensibly discuss in terms of probabilities.” There is good data on earthquakes and their magnitudes even if the the location of a particular earthquake can’t be predicted. Earthquake insurance is available. Kay tells an amusing story about a man who asked him to identify possible black swan events that might occur in the next five years (his point is that if the possibility can be identified, it is not a black swan). Kay gives some good examples of black swans—watchmakers being put out of business by quartz technology or radium turning out to kill the first scientists to work with it. But can an earthquake of the extraordinary magnitude of the Japanese earthquake—the fourth largest since 1900—be considered an outlier?