Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books (Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan) make the point that power laws are better at describing how uncertain the world we live

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books (Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan) make the point that power laws are better at describing how uncertain the world we live in is, rather than making uncertainty and risk tractable in the way that the bell curve models. The properties of the bell curve are well known, and therefore easier to perform statistical tests with, whereas the many stable power law distributions are harder to deal with and more difficult to simply assume.