{"id":2044,"date":"2009-04-09T04:20:07","date_gmt":"2009-04-09T04:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2009-04-09T04:20:56","modified_gmt":"2009-04-09T04:20:56","slug":"in_which_i_have","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2044","title":{"rendered":"In Which I Have The Temerity To Disagree With Taleb – More Than Once!!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nicholas Taleb has a column up in the Financial Times – ‘Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world<\/a>‘<\/p>\n

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small.<\/i> Agree.<\/p>\n

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. <\/i> Agree. No, make that AGREE<\/b>.<\/p>\n

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.<\/i> Not so sure; people learn from their mistakes, and a “one strike and you’re out” model seems like it would leave a lot of brand-new people driving the bus…<\/p>\n

4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.<\/i> Depends on what he incentive bonus is and over what term -if their incentive is tied to my 20-year returns, great!<\/p>\n

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.<\/i> I think this could be better stated as ‘in complex domains, require simple products and in simple domains, allow complex products’<\/p>\n

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning.<\/i> There’s a place for instruments too complex to easily understand – it’s just not in the center of our financial markets or economy.<\/p>\n

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence.<\/i> Bullshit; all economics depends on confidence; when we are confident, our ‘animal spirits’ are high and we are active economically and all benefit. Periodically, we have to clear the deadwood.<\/p>\n

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.<\/i> Well, that’s good advice in terms of clearing markets – but maybe it’s worth it to manage deleveraging to minimize social damage??<\/p>\n

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement.<\/i> So – Social Security? Funded by??<\/p>\n

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.<\/i> Or, don’t fix broken things with rotten wood – rebuild them. Hmmm. Ground up? All our financial markets are the organically-grown products of markets that have been around for a long time. Perhaps we should deeply modify some features of these markets – but rebuild them de novo<\/i>??<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nicholas Taleb prescribes in the FT. Armed Liberal disagrees…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2044"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}