Risk taking elites never pays

Taleb, a financial options trader turned author and flaneur who delights in blitzing the many intellectuals he disrespects. He Devotes one section of Skin in the Game to criticising the practice of “those who can do; those who can’t, teach” complaint.

In Taleb’s earlier bestselling book of Fooled by Randomness (2001), a groundbreaking and farsighted dissertation on probability, and the statistical biases and errors to which traders and other are prone.

He highlighted how the traders tend to overestimate the probability of things continuing as before – that all swans will be white – and to emaciate rare events.

In finance, traders tend to go short on volatility and are prone to be caught out by abrupt moves in prices, like the 2008 crisis and the recent fluctuations of financial markets.

Taleb explains his belief that people should only be heeded or trusted if they have a personal stake in the outcome and advice from everyone else must be ignored or treated with scepticism.  It’s all about having something to lose and sharing risks with others, and Taleb illustrates the foundation of risk management in fact it applies to all aspects of our lives.

He also highlights the ethics from Antaeus the Giant to Hammurabi to Donald Trump and even to used car salesmen, to create a framework for understanding his idea and insights, as according to him minorities run the world not majorities, you can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot.                

Skin in the Game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their neck they are putting on the line.

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Allen Lane £20, Random House $30, 304 pages.