The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable · chapter 4 · id the-black-swan-c4-01-the-cemetery-of-failed-restaur

“The cemetery of failed restaurants is full of owners who thought they were the next big thing. We see the successful restaurants and conclude the restaurant business is easy. We never visit the graveyard. This 'silent evidence' systematically biases our perception of risk and reward.”

holdsconfidence: high⚠ extracted by pipeline, re-audit pending

Receipts

Headd (2003), 'Redefining Business Success: Distinguishing Between Closure and Failure', Small Business EconomicsDOI registry: valid

Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows approximately 20% of new businesses fail in the first year, 45% within 5 years, and 65% within 10 years.

Abraham Wald, Sequential Analysis Group (1943)source alive

Wald's WWII analysis of returning bomber damage patterns -- the missing bullet holes were on planes that never returned. This is the canonical survivorship bias example.

Brown, Goetzmann & Ross (1995), 'Survival', Journal of FinanceDOI registry: valid

Survivorship bias in mutual fund databases inflates reported average returns by approximately 0.9% per year because failed funds are removed from the dataset.

This claim is a stable, citable object. If you can falsify a verdict, tell us — corrections are loud here.