For the inaugural video in the New Yorker Currents series, Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks with James Surowiecki about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and the future of the economy.
Shared by JohnH
HatTip to Dave Lull!
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11 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
A very cheap derivative work off my idea of Black Swan Events down to the Black/White cover. Very cheap.
N N Taleb |
ETHICAL QUESTION – Invitat culpam, qui delictum praeterit (Publilius the Syrian): Being silent about a crime is a crime. Roman morals punished passive collaboration, acts of omission. This answers the earlier discussion about responsibilities & crimes of NOT reacting against a fraud.
Christopher Lydon / Nassim Taleb telephone interview.
3. On bailouts: My analogy is to the gambler who is now gambling with the trust fund of his unborn great-great-granchildren… Prudence should be the first thing on the agenda of governments, not speculation. Stimulus packages are speculation… We are gambling on a massive recovery. It’s too big a gamble, and besides it’s immoral.
2. In the economic crisis, and in the Gulf of Mexico, what we should be discovering is not who made what mistake, but the fact of fragility. Alas, what we don’t learn is… that we don’t learn.
1. No government can fortify something that’s inherently fragile.
May 19, 2010 51:32
Nassim Taleb professor, writer
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, renowned expert on risk and randomness, discusses The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. This bestselling book is now out in paperback with a new essay, “On Robustness and Fragility.”
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.
Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”
This lecture contains strong language.
