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A crash course in changing the world.
"Mr Black Swan" has a radical view on money and finance - but it does not go down so well with the World Bank :-)
Nassim Taleb is a quantitative analyst with a long experience in finance. He is the author of a very successful book, The Black Swan, where he contends that most of the variability in the money world is concentrated in very few, very large events. They can't be predicted, or mitigated.
In 2009 he gave an iconoclastic talk at a World Bank conference on Markets and Crises: What Next and How? Former World Bank Senior Manager John Nellis (now principal at his own consultancy company) reports on the talk in a very funny, very exasperated post on the World Bank's own Private Sector Development Blog - which by the way I strongly recommend following. Here's an excerpt:
Well, the post is funny, but I think Mr. Nellis is not being completely fair here. "Abolish debt" is actually a proposal. It is very radical, but worth considering. Of course, it would wipe out 99% of the financial sector, but some people are seriously wondering what those guys are contributing to the common good anyway.
After all we are being asked to think outside the box here. Mr Taleb's proposal is WAY outside the box, so why is he not taken seriously? And this question hides another one, more momentous to EVOKE agents. Just how far outside the box are we supposed to think to make valuable contributions towards saving the world? Does Alchemy agree or disagree with Mr. Nellis?
Maybe Mr. Taleb should be playing EVOKE. :-)
In 2009 he gave an iconoclastic talk at a World Bank conference on Markets and Crises: What Next and How? Former World Bank Senior Manager John Nellis (now principal at his own consultancy company) reports on the talk in a very funny, very exasperated post on the World Bank's own Private Sector Development Blog - which by the way I strongly recommend following. Here's an excerpt:
Questions included "How should we go about reforming the regulatory system?" Answer: Don't try to reform it; scrap it. "But what should we do?” Answer: Abolish debt. All of the world's great religions agree; there should be no interest. "Did regulators make the crisis worse by their incompetence?" Not an area of interest to him; he is not concerned with minor tinkering with the system. Good-bye.
Well, the post is funny, but I think Mr. Nellis is not being completely fair here. "Abolish debt" is actually a proposal. It is very radical, but worth considering. Of course, it would wipe out 99% of the financial sector, but some people are seriously wondering what those guys are contributing to the common good anyway.
After all we are being asked to think outside the box here. Mr Taleb's proposal is WAY outside the box, so why is he not taken seriously? And this question hides another one, more momentous to EVOKE agents. Just how far outside the box are we supposed to think to make valuable contributions towards saving the world? Does Alchemy agree or disagree with Mr. Nellis?
Maybe Mr. Taleb should be playing EVOKE. :-)
Views: 64
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Comment by Mark Mulkerin on April 4, 2010 at 3:10pm
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@Alberto - And thanks for starting this topic.
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@AV - There are some in the developed world that are not pleased with the loans and some in the developing world who take great pleasure in them. But beyond that, I'm not sure I agree with your dichotomy. I have walked by my share of homeless sleeping in the gutters of the US and of Louis Vuitton toting wealthy from developing countries - the percentages based on society vary, but for those who are willing to look it is there. How does the west tackle problems ... knowledge, but not experience ... having lived abroad for a number of years now, I think I can reasonably say that ignorance and experience is not exclusive to any one group of people. There are plenty of westerns that have the effort to experience, perhaps not enough, but please don't dismiss them with generalities. Cheers.
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AV, I'd love to do away with money except that the evidence for the quality life of humanity in pre-history isn't great. We've tried that experiment and people still managed to muck things up. We tried various forms of communism etc. and they went badly.
Trust me, I've put in my time with philosophers, literary theorists, and political theorists and their arguments go back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle (I've done Hegel too) and it leaves me wanting evidence, the tangible, the measurable. And it isn't you - I ask that of everyone. If Evoke fails to get gamers to become social innovators who are committed to change and instead makes social innovators into gamers who just want points, then I'd say interesting experiment, but pull the plug.
And frankly, I don't want to argue. I want to meet and converse and exchange ideas with others who share my concerns about the direction the entire world is headed - not just the developed or the developing. Again, I'm fine with the idea of a world without money if it were realistic in our current state of knowledge, technology, and wisdom. Since it isn't (at least I haven't seen the evidence), I work with what is. No hard feelings on my end.
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Comment by Alberto Cottica on April 4, 2010 at 4:53pm
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@Mark I really like your epistemic angle.
Of course you are absolutely right about people gaming various systems :-)
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Comment by Patricio Buenrostro-Gilhuys on April 5, 2010 at 6:52am
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I profoundly disagree with Mr. Taleb´s "People who use history as a guide do not understand history." The Austrian School of economics and the Austrian Business Cycle Theory predicted the Great Depression and with those same tools it was easy to predict the latest economic crisis. I think short term History does not serve as a model, but long term History and emerging patterns-cycles are definitely one of the most powerful tools to avoid black swans.
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@Patricio - It's weather versus climate. I think Taleb would agree that you will have cycles, you will have trends, you will have ups and downs, but trying to predict that it would be the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that would light the fuse for the First World War is a sucker's bet. For example, based on human history, someone is going to start a new religion that will win adherents (or maybe remodel an old one), but who knows where it will happen, what it will be, etc. This is why psychics are so effective - they say, something bad is going to happen next year - no kidding.
Perhaps, we will learn enough about economies to mitigate internal effects of black swans, but then the Greenland ice sheet melts, the thermal halene current shuts down, and we all start looking for mammoths. Or the black death part two. Or something. History teaches us that we are eternally overconfident.
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@Mark- I see where you are coming from. I can totally agree with you in "History teaches us that we are eternally overconfident."
Talking about re-inventing money and banks- What could happen in a system with NO interest rates and NO debt for individuals and nations. I know it sounds almost impossible but let´s speculate with all options here.
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@Patricio - Don't speculate. Experiment. Or speculate, then experiment. Figure out a way to test the system out and see if it works. I fear that such a system would entrench wealth disparities, but if data showed me wrong - okay. (My reasoning is that a person without resources would be unable to take a chance on it since they wouldn't be able to borrow to see it through.)
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Comment by Lynn Caldwell on April 7, 2010 at 8:02am
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I hero-worship Nassim Taleb. Malcolm Gladwell is also worth a mention - he wrote the Tipping Point and outlined everything you need to create a social epidemic. And this is the thing - it's the culture and thinking that make things happen. Businesses respond to historic trends - they don't set them.
As to your question of whether we choose to think outside the box or not, and whether this is a good or bad thing...You have to think how you think - some people say you are purposely thinking outside the box, when actually, this is just the way you think and what you think makes sense. I don't think Nassim Taleb means to be so radical - it's just the way he thinks.
One of his insightful points is that we only do things, and most of it is quite random. When something big happens - its on account of us not knowing what we have done, and yet, we look back and consider points and make sense of how we got here, and we create a narrative which shows that every move was concidered. If 'what has happened' is bad - we create a narative to show conspiracy or how we should have known this would happen. If what has happened is good - we create a very stong narrative to suggest that this was the plan all along.
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Comment by darklogos on April 24, 2010 at 1:35pm
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I think that the solution isn't to eliminate debt but to eliminate interest. If you make loaning money a non-profit expenditure you make it so people are forced to save. On the other hand people that do loan money on interest will make crazy amounts of money in underground loan agreements. Sadly the cat is out of the bag and trying to put it back in will only cause more problems. I agree with a lot of your post on principle.
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