I am pleased to announce the @TalebWisdom account is active again. Follow for curated insights from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books, interviews, and tw… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy.

...and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen.

The contagious creation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century led to what we saw with the two world wars and their sequels.

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and todays employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom….Soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error from children's lives and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. They are good students, but nerds — that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are totally untrained to handle ambiguity….Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living.