The link below will take you to an audio player where you can hear the Dec 3, 2012 interview with NNT. It’s the first half hour of the show.
“The Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses his latest work “Antifragile” and how we can thrive in a world controlled by randomness.
LG: Are you saying that capitalism is good but that 21st-century capitalism has gone too far?
NNT: What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats. The largest “fragilizer” of society is a lack of skin in the game. If you are mayor of a small town, you are penalized for your mistakes because you are made accountable when you go to church. But we are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes—bureaucrats, bankers, and academics with too much power. They game the system while citizens pay the price. I want the entrepreneur to be respected, not the CEO of a company who has all the upsides and none of the downsides.
LG: Politicians like U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron seem interested in your ideas. Is the West making its economies antifragile?
NNT: I think Cameron’s government is aware of the problem and doing what it can given the circumstances it inherited. The economic class doesn’t realize an economy lives by stressors rather than by top-down control. This is what the previous prime minister, Gordon Brown, did with “we want to eliminate boom and bust.” He mistook the economy for something you take for repair. Governments shoot for robustness, but you must make the economy gain from errors. Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.
More paywall teasers today. Perhaps NNT will publish a pdf to his site (which he often does).
For a thinker who reckons we all need a bit of randomness in life to make us stronger, Nassim Nicholas Taleb is surprisingly bothered that his usual table in his usual restaurant in Brooklyn is occupied.
Taleb’s obvious irritation does not seem a good start for an interview with a man who has little time for journalists, as he believes they misinterpret his work or “insert their own noise” in what he is trying to say.
He has already brushed off the Sunday Times photographer, telling him he doesn’t want to be photographed as “I am not a public intellectual”, and if he must then not with any New York backdrop or prop as “that would be fake, acting”, nor in his office at New York University as “that’s private”.
via Nassim Nicholas Taleb: He’s come back to scare us again | The Sunday Times.
HatTip to Dave Lull.