Nassim Taleb predicts the next 25 years
downloads.economist.feedroom.com
downloads.economist.feedroom.com
- the basic problem with most "futurism" is that it's additive. what's more interesting, and what Taleb is trying to do, is look at what no longer belongs: what will be removed, or what is fragile
- First thing that will be gone is the US Federal Reserve [and I presume he's implying most central banks]. It's very error prone, very centralized, and thus fragile. It depends on a central figurehead (the chairman, i.e. Bernanke or Greenspan). If they make a human error, that will percolate through the global system. We need more financial system redundancy, thus there will likely be currencies independent of government; we have lost faith in technocrats running our affairs.
- The nation state will be going away, with power reverting back to "statelings" and the city state. It's Abu Dhabi vs. a large country like Saudi Arabia. The nation state is very artificial, based on the French romantic ideal in the 19th century of the nation state, but went bankrupt because this lead to more aggressiveness and wars. It's unstable in the current world because we've become too interconnected; when some parts of the world have the authority of a nation state they can't "do" anything other than fatten government officials.
- Mandelbrot discovered a law regarding life expectancy of technologies, similar to how actuaries in life insurance companies can guestimate a person's "conditional life expectancy". A technology that is 25 years old is likely to stay around for another 25 years. The implication is that most of today's technologies will fail, maybe a few today will survive, whether they make sense or not. The bicycle will be there, the car will be there, the wall-to-wall bookshelf will still be there (the book is 500 years old). These things are very robust in the face of change. Something like an Amazon Kindle is pretty fragile. Computers from 10 or 20 years ago have files that are very hard, if not impossible to retrieve - this is an illustration of the instability of technology. Whereas a technology (like a paper book) that lasts 500 years likely has some properties that we don't quite understand; it fits our minds or our genetic makeup in a special way.
- Corporations won't survive; artisans tend to survive. Corps follow the stock market and thus will take the BP approach of high-risk/high-reward, but this will greatly expose them to black swans. The artisan model, like I'm wearing shoes from a French company that has been making shoes forever, companies that aren't listed on the stock market, and thus are not motivated by it, will tend to survive.
- Science has always been about revolutions, it has never been incremental in its progress. Having said this, things have been depleted and we are running into some fundamental limits in some domains more than we realize [he doesn't really go beyond this]
- Black Swans will be a more common species of event, or more consequential, because the world is more connected, more efficient, and thus will have massive pockets of instability. Unless we realize this & move to more robust forms of organization: artisan, city-states, decentralized, as he prefers, the world is going to get more and more exposed at scale to unpredictable events.