SEPTEMBER 9, 2013
Taleb on Skin in the Game
Nassim Taleb Hosted by Russ Roberts
Nassim Taleb of NYU-Poly talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his recent paper with Constantine Sandis on the morality and effectiveness of “skin in the game.” When decision makers have skin in the game–when they share in the costs and benefits of their decisions that might affect others–they are more likely to make prudent decisions than in cases where decision-makers can impose costs on others. Taleb sees skin in the game as not just a useful policy concept but a moral imperative. The conversation closes with some observations on the power of expected value for evaluating predictions along with Taleb’s thoughts on economists who rarely have skin in the game when they make forecasts or take policy positions.
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Tag Archives: econtalk.org
Taleb on Antifragility | EconTalk | Library of Economics and Liberty
I’ve been waiting for this!
Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about antifragility, the concept behind Taleb’s next book, a work in progress. Taleb talks about how we can cope with our ignorance and uncertainty in a complex world. Topics covered include health, finance, political systems, the Fed, your career, Seneca, shame, heroism, and a few more.
“A Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
via Taleb on Antifragility | EconTalk | Library of Economics and Liberty.
EconTalk – De Vany on Evolutionary Fitness
Arthur De Vany, of the University of California, Irvine, and creator of Evolutionary Fitness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about performance-enhancing drugs in baseball and Evolutionary Fitness, De Vany’s ideas about diet and fitness. In the first part of the conversation, De Vany argues that there is little physiological or statistical evidence that steroid use increases home run totals in baseball. The second part of the conversation turns to De Vany’s theories of diet and exercise. De Vany argues that our diet and exercise regime should take account of our evolutionary origins, an earlier time when we ate no grains and our exercise was a mix of intense activity punctuated by much milder activity. He argues that jogging is unhealthy and that we would live longer and feel better if we followed a different exercise routine than most Americans do today.