The World in 2036: Nassim Taleb looks at what will break, and what won't (2010)

If I like Taleb, who else should be reading?

> https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1204827396999929857

Last time I checked, Taleb lives in NYC. Surprise! That's where the "doom" will happen once the USD is hyper-inflated and the USA is bankrupt. Someone is not following his own advice.

I'd also bet that Taleb is using in his daily-life more big corp products than small-family owned ones. I'm really wondering where this cognitive dissonance is coming from since many "high-profile" people seem to be suffering from it.

Some reasons Taleb comes off as so intransigent and just obstinate in real-life is two fold -

1) He sees as profoundly evil the privatization of profits and socialization of risks (banks) and sees "no consequence" professions - economists, experts, bureaucrats, war mongers, politicians and intellectuals as deeply unethical and predatory.

2) He went through a phase which he talks about in Anti Fragile, after the publication of Black Swan that he actually had to get security and was broadly shunned by the financial and intellectual elite which went against them. He is also independently wealthy and has learnt to inoculate himself to the circular congratulatory world of honors, awards, citations etc.

Taleb has been right about a lot of things and obviously wrong about few. However that is a difficult yardstick to measure on when the events he is talking about unfold once every 100 years or longer. It takes immense courage to make a stand on things that might never happen in your lifetime. For example he has been talking about the risks of pandemics for years and wrote a very prescient piece on Covid-19 in Jan. Now, China could have very well stopped Covid-19 in its tracks like they did SARs and we would have been spared and he would have looked like a fear monger. However it was the right call for Taleb to make and that is true courage.

I began reading Taleb when Fooled by Randomness came out in the early 200s. Read The Black Swan and then stopped because I did not find his work prescriptive. Recently got through the rest of his books and wished I had read them much much earlier. Now I plan to re-read them every two years.

Most intellectuals, including the general population of HN, have an almost allergic reaction to Taleb. They find him pompous, insufferable, unscientific, unoriginal and the rest. To each his own but it would behoove anyone who generally cares about how the world works to give the Incerto a read with an open mind.

BTW he is hugely bullish on the value of startups to both individuals and society (Anti-Fragile and Skin In the Game).

This here is crucial. Investment in capitalism resolves around predicting future profits and committing yourself to those predictions via debt and leverage. However, the heavier your commitments or the further the future swings from your predictions, the more of today's production you've wastefully dumped into a hole.

Can you imagine how beautiful that is? When I'm bored, I take a look at his twitter account and get inspired by things I would hardly find elsewhere.

Ah, on the inequality part: you would deserve a proper explanation, but in summary: I'm Italian, living in San Francisco for the past decade; when he says there's more inequality in Florence than in the US, I have a deep gut feeling that he's completely wrong. I know Florence and I know San Francisco, in terms of inequality I would always pick Florence (in terms of being a fairer system). I just need to pick outside my window to see several homeless people, and that's only scratching the surface.

[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...

> The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians' misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence.

1. So far, NOT TRUE. Nation-states still dominate the global landscape, and a majority have annual budget deficits (i.e., there is no "fiscal prudence").

> Currencies might still exist, but, after the disastrous experience of America's Federal Reserve, they will peg to some currency without a government, such as gold.

2. So far, NOT TRUE. AFAIK, no national currencies are pegged to gold nor to some other "currency without a government". Currencies created by government fiat dominate.

> Companies that are currently large, debt-laden, listed on an exchange (hence “efficient”) and paying bonuses will be gone. Those that will survive will be the more black swan-resistant—smaller, family-owned, unlisted on exchanges and free of debt. There will be large companies then, but these will be new—and short-lived.

3. So far, NOT TRUE. Most companies that are large, debt-laden, and exchange-traded are still around in their current form, though many have been supported by government largesse during the covid-19 pandemic.

> Most of the technologies that are now 25 years old or more will be around; almost all of the younger ones “providing efficiencies” will be gone, either supplanted by competing ones or progressively replaced by the more robust archaic ones. So the car, the plane, the bicycle, the voice-only telephone, the espresso machine and, luckily, the wall-to-wall bookshelf will still be with us.

4. So far, TRUE.

> The world will face severe biological and electronic pandemics, another gift from globalisation.

5. TRUE on the biological front!!!

6. So far, NOT TRUE on the electronic front.

> Religious practice will experience a revival, seen as a conveyor of robust heuristics, cultural values and rituals.

7. So far, NOT TRUE. See, for example: https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christ...

> Science will produce smaller and smaller gains in the non-linear domain, in spite of the enormous resources it will consume; instead it will start focusing on what it cannot—and should not—do.

8. So far... MAYBE? I mean, we have seen remarkable advances in AI (vision, NLP, speech, etc.), distributed systems (e.g., blockchains), quantum computing (Google, IBM, others), space exploration (Tesla, Blue Origin, others), green energy (Tesla again)... I'm inclined to say, as of yet, NOT TRUE.

> Finally, what is now called academic economics will be treated with the same disrespect that rigorous (and practical) minds currently have for Derrida-style post-modernist verbiage.

9. So far, NOT TRUE. Academic economists still seem to be treated with about as much respect as in 2010.

I just think the worst case here we're really going towards Dystopian Sci-Fi "one world government and super corporations" rather than city states.

I read his entire Incerto, and it was an absolute slog. Endless chapters just about how he's smarter than other Wall Street guys. Antifragile is probably the best book in the series, but the concept itself could be relegated to an essay -- not a whole book. As far as the article itself is concerned, it's typical doomerism. His entire post-Wall Street career revolves around doom and gloom (his main claim to fame being "black swan" events), so of course it makes sense that, from a Talebian perspective, the world will end by 2035.