Monday, October 21, 2019

Do the US & EU Governments Have an Expert/ Pseudo-Expert Problem?

The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan"

Nassim Taleb, 2018 PBS interview
PAUL SOLMAN: I first interviewed you in 2006. “Black Swan” hadn’t even come out yet. Then came “Black Swan,” the book. Then came the crash of ’08. You became famous for warning people, having warned people, about extreme events and how cataclysmic they could be, right?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: The reason people paid attention to my work was because I had skin the game at the time. I was involved. I was taking risks.

PAUL SOLMAN: You were a trader.

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: I was involved. I was eating my risk. Owning my own risk, as I write in the book.

PAUL SOLMAN: Are there black swans on the horizon now? What are you betting on?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: The point is, the system is fragile because we had a lot of debt. Plus, there are a bunch of things that have been developing that I’m not comfortable with, developing over, say, the least 20 years, but mostly the last 10 years, I’m not comfortable with.

PAUL SOLMAN: They are?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: It’s that rise of the class, the no-skin-in-the-game class in decision-making.

PAUL SOLMAN: The no-skin-in-the-game class?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: Exactly. Decision-makers who can drag you into intervention, can drag you into policies that cosmetically feel good, but eventually, somebody pays a price and it’s not them.

There are two levels. The first one, and the most obvious one, is people who intervene in Iraq, thinking, “Hey, we’re going to bring democracy,” or some abstract concept. The thing falls apart, and they walk away from it. They’re not committed with living or owning the toy. They broke it. They don’t own it. Then, the same people make the same mistake with Libya and then now currently with Syria, the warmongers. In the past, historically, warmongers were soldiers. You could not rise in a senate if you didn’t have war experience. [Today if] you have a class of people who inflict risk on others without being affected by the outcome, that class of people is going to disrupt the system, causing some kind of collapse.

PAUL SOLMAN: Do you see some kind of collapse on the horizon?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
: I can see some severe distortions now from that class of people deciding to “fix” things and, effectively, not paying the price.

PAUL SOLMAN: What risk are they posing to us now?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: Well, the system is loaded with debt that has benefited these bankers. The chairman of a certain bank now is making $23 million a year again in bonuses…. So, people don’t understand that we’re not learning from previous crises to force people to have skin in the game, so they can avoid stashing these risks.

Paul Solman: But if I’m a manager, CEO of a company and I have stock options, then I am punished if the stock goes down.

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: No, not really, because you still have upside, net you have upside.

PAUL SOLMAN
: You mean, I’m only going to be compensated, I’m never going to have money taken away from me.

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: Exactly, whereas the taxpayer only has a downside of that trade. The taxpayer will never have the benefit of what’s going on, but we pay the price as taxpayers.

PAUL SOLMAN: Because we’re going to bail them out, you mean?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: Of course, so we are really the people who are owning the risk.

PAUL SOLMAN: So, what’s the cost?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: Let me take you back to the “Black Swan” and an idea I continued. In the “Black Swan,” I asked myself, “There are experts who are experts, and experts who aren’t. What marker is there? How would we know? We know very well that a pilot, a plane pilot, is an expert. Why, because there’s skin in the game, there’s some kind of contact with reality. A dentist is an expert. Your tailor is an expert. But you can never tell if an employee of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is an expert. As a matter of fact, I’m certain that they’re not experts. Economic forecasters, [but] they are not experts. So, they are what I call the “faux experts.”

We know where they are. It’s very simply someone who makes a decision that doesn’t have visible consequences for the person to be affected. And that’s what I call the no-skin-in-the-game expert.

PAUL SOLMAN: And it’s to the reaction against those experts that you attribute to Brexit and Donald Trump?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
: Yes, of that rise of the class of pseudo experts running our affairs.

PAUL SOLMAN: My initial question was, “What black swans do you see now?” You said, ‘Hey, too many people with not enough skin in the game, is setting us up for…’ What?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: For a riot, because people understand. They have the Web, they have Twitter, they have access.

PAUL SOLMAN: What are they going to do?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: They are rioting. They elected Trump, they are electing all these governments… There’s a riot against the class of over-educated, Harvard, Ivy-league, Cambridge, Oxford, Ecole Normale in France, this whole class of people is no longer going to be able to run our affairs… The system laden with debt and with pseudo experts will collapse eventually.

PAUL SOLMAN: So, that’s the black swan, a collapse.

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: A collapse, because we haven’t really remedied what happened in 2008. We haven’t fixed anything from 2008, what caused 2008. There’s still a lot of debt in the system… Now it may be, miraculously, under Trump, we may have a second wind and America may rise again, and pay the debt. Hopefully that would work.

PAUL SOLMAN: You mean huge economic growth?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: That’s my hope.

PAUL SOLMAN: Were you in favor of Donald Trump?

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: I was not against. First of all I gave him higher odds, because of this. I was writing the chapter on the I-Y-I, the Intellectual Yet Idiot, and I was describing the mechanism. And I said people are rioting against that. And I said that anyone who makes more sense to your Chinese grocery store owner, just off the ship, more than to an intellectual, would win. That’s what happened. I gave Trump close to 50 percent chance at a time when it was not possible. Mostly for technical reasons, and also because I believe that you can see that he makes a lot of sense to merchants, to small business owners, but he doesn’t make sense to intellectuals. So, he has to be that person. But anyone would have been elected, had they played that same platform, of coming in and trying to address in simplistic, but very clear, no nonsense terms to the general public.

PAUL SOLMAN: By saying the people who have been running the show have been leading you astray.

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: He got the disease right. Now whether he’s going to fix it, I don’t know.

18 comments:

Dervish Sanders said...

… Now it may be, miraculously, under Trump, we may have a second wind and America may rise again, and pay the debt. Hopefully that would work.

LOL! What an idiot!

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

It's a lot saner than trying to "tax us out of it"... the Democrat plan.

Dervish Sanders said...

A plan to pay down the national debt by slashing taxes -- thereby driving up the debt bigly -- is 100 percent INSANE. The Democratic plan to provide stuff everyone NEEDS by raising taxes to pay for the stuff? It is a totally sane (and GREAT!) plan.

Joe Conservative said...

The only "painless" way to pay off the debt is to GROW your way out of it. You can't TAX your way out, "painlessly". TAX = pain.

Dervish Sanders said...

Something that grows without limits is cancer. There are limits to growth. A small amount of "pain" -- especially when talking about very rich people who will hardly notice it -- is a much better way to go. Given the fact that cancer can be pretty painful -- even fatal. (The cancer being global climate change, pollution, overpopulation, etc).

Joe Conservative said...

Something that grows without limits is cancer.

THAT's Bernies BIG Government, all right. A cancer!

Dervish Sanders said...

Big government = the people have the power.

Limited government = the oligarchs have the power.

Mrs. Grundy said...

Big government = the people's "representatives" have the power.

representatives = kronies

;p

Mrs. Grundy said...

Big Government = cooperative framework for oligarchy.

Dervish Sanders said...

I agree. Our republican and corporate Dem representatives are bought and paid for by the oligarchs.

Small government = the oligarchs win.

Big government run by the bought-and-paid-for "representatives" = the oligarchs win.

Big government run by the fake billionaire Dotard = the oligarchs win.

Big government run by Progressive Democrats working for The People = everyone wins.

Joe Conservative said...

If Bernie's just working for the people... how did he get to be a millionaire?

Progressive Democrats = myths for stupid people

Bernie Sanders - $2 million USD (2017)

Joe Biden -$9 million USD (2019)

Elizabeth Warren -$8 million USD (2019)

Kamala Harris -$4 million USD (2019)

Dervish Sanders said...

By writing a successful book. But I guess the same "logic" doesn't apply to Dotard. Although we don't know what his finances look like because he continues to hide his tax returns. I wonder why...

Thersites said...

The US taxpayer doesn't pay Bernie Sanders $174k/year to write books.

Dervish Sanders said...

Employees are free to do as they please with their free time. By your logic he should also not be running for the Democratic nomination while still a senator. Yet members of both parties have done so in the past.

Thersites said...

They also use their staffers to write and edit their books.

Joe Conservative said...

:)

Dervish Sanders said...

If you're happy that Bernie Sanders writes books (as your list link smiley face indicates you to be), then why the complaint?

I thought your link might be to a tell-all article by a Bernie Sanders staffer titled "I wrote/co-wrote Bernie Sanders' book". But it isn't. Obviously your accusation is completely baseless.

Silverfiddle said...

Taleb is brilliant. "The Experts" have been serially and flamboyantly screwing the pooch of over 50 years, at least.

Hubris and ignorance are a dangerous combination.