Reason.com Nassim Taleb Talks Antifragile, Libertarianism, and Capitalism's Genius for Failure The best-selling author of The Black Swan talks about his new book and why most public intellectuals aren't worth a damn. _Nick Gillespie_ (http://reason.com/people/nick-gillespie/all) & _Jim Epstein_ (http://reason.com/people/jim-epstein/all) | January 20, 2013 Taleb drew wide attention after the 2007 publication of _The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/081297381X/reasonmagazineA/) , which warned that our institutions and risk models aren't designed to account for rare and catastrophic events. Among other things, the book cautioned that oversized and unaccountable banks using flawed investment models could bring on a financial crisis. He also warned that the government-sanctioned housing finance agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were sitting on a "barrel of dynamite." One year after The Black Swan was published, a global banking crisis was brought on by the very factors he identified.
Taleb doesn't identify as a libertarian, but he often sounds like one. He has argued that we need to build a society where major actors have "skin in the game" and our public intellectuals can bloviate without subjecting the rest of us to the consequences of their bad ideas. He _supported Ron Paul_ (http://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-taleb-ron-paul-2012-1) in the 2012 presidential election and has cited the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek as an influence. Taleb has called New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman "vile and harmful" and coined the phrase the "Stiglitz Syndrome" after Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, which refers to the phenomenon of public intellectuals being held utterly unaccountable for their bad predictions. Paul Krugman and Paul Samuelson are among Taleb's other Nobel laureate bête noires. Taleb's new book is _Antifragile: Things that Gain with Disorder_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0083DJWGO/reasonmagazineA/) , which argues that in order to create robust institutions we must allow them to build resilience through adversity. The essence of capitalism, he argues, is encouraging failure, not rewarding success. Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Taleb for a wide-ranging discussion about why debt leads to fragility (5:16); the importance of "skin in the game" to a properly functioning financial system (10:45); why large banks should be nationalized (21:47); why technology won't rule the future (24:20); the value of studying the classics (26:09); his intellectual adversaries (33:30); why removing things is often the best way to solve problems (36:50); his intellectual influences (39:10); why capitalism is more about disincentives than incentives (43:10); why large, centralized states are prone to fail (44:50); his libertarianism (47:30); and why he'll never take writing advice from "some academic at Cambridge who sold 2,200 copies" (51:49). -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
