Reason.tv: Nassim Taleb Talks Antifragile, Libertarianism, and Capitalism’s Genius for Failure

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 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.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from DisorderTaleb’s new book is Antifragile: Things that Gain with Disorder, 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).

Produced by Jim Epstein; camera by Epstein and Anthony L. Fisher.

Approximately 56 minutes.

Go to http:// reason. com/ reasontv/ 2013/ 01/ 20/ interview- with- nassim- nicholas- taleb for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube Channel to receive automatic updated when new material goes live.

RSA: Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Antifragile

RSA Keynote

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of ‘The Black Swan’ and one of the most radical and iconoclastic thinkers of our times, visits the RSA to reveal how to thrive in an uncertain world.

In ‘The Black Swan’, Taleb showed that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In his new book Antifragile, he provides a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Standing uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, Taleb proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine, in Taleb’s uniquely interdisciplinary and erudite style.

At the RSA, Nassim Taleb will show how the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events, and will consider a number of critical questions, such as: why is the city-state better than the nation-state; why is debt bad for you; why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all; and why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak?

Speaker: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and author of ‘Antifragile: how to live in a world we don’t understand’ (Allen Lane, 2012).

Discussant: Rohan Silva, senior policy adviser to the Prime Minister at No 10 Downing Street.

Chair: Fraser Nelson, editor, The Spectator

Link: http:// www. thersa. org/ events/ audio- and- past- events/ 2012/ antifragile
Full podcast including audience Q&A:
http:// www. thersa. org/__data/ assets/ file/ 0006/ 999816/ 20121206 NassimNicholasTaleb. mp3
www. thersa. org/ events/ audio- and- past- events/ 2012/ antifragile

Nassim Taleb: More Skin in the Game in 2013

2013-logo

“Those who have the upside are not necessarily those who incur the downside. For example, bankers and corporate managers get bonuses for “performance,” but not reverse bonuses for negative performance, and they have an incentive to bury risks in the tails of the distribution –& in other words, to delay blowups.

The ancients were fully aware of this incentive to hide risks,& and implemented very simple but potent heuristics. About 3,800 years ago, the Code of Hammurabi specified that if a house collapses and causes the death of its owner, the house’s builder shall be put to death.”

Link: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/improving-managers–incentives-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb