Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1 January 1960 in Amioun, Lebanon) is an essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Sarah Josephine Taleb (CC BY)
Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.
Just as eating cow-meat doesn't turn you into a cow, studying philosophy doesn't make you wiser.
To understand why what happens in Hollywood is irrelevant to the rest of humans: 1) How many ACTORs do you have among your friends? 2) How many ACTOR friends do your friends have? Actors rarely mix with real people.
