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Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto)

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A bold work from the author of The Black Swan that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility

In his most provocative and practical book yet,one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life.

As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights:

• For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations.
• Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general.
• Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others.
• You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.
• Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines.
• True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you’re willing to risk for it.

The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

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Random House
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This book is about the idea of "skin in the game" and how it applies to various aspects of life, including risk management, social justice, and personal responsibility.
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You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.
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Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.
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Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.
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From the Publisher

Antifragile;Nassim Nicholas Taleb;business;economics;stocks;investments;decision making;leadership


	The Black Swan, Second Edition	Fooled by Randomness	Antifragile	The Bed of Procrustes	Incerto, Deluxe Box Set

Customer Reviews	7,282	5,736	7,361	1,545	385
Price	$10.99	$12.99	$12.52	$14.43	$138.29
	The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we don’t know, now with a new section called “On Robustness and Fragility.”	An investigation about luck–or more precisely, about how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business.	Through deep investigation and insight, Antifragile reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.	With a rare combination of pointed wit and potent wisdom, Taleb plows through human illusions, contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance, and erudition against the modern diseases of nerdiness, philistinism, and phoniness.	The Incerto Series is an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world. Makes the perfect gift for the perpetually curious.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The problem with Taleb is not that he’s an asshole. He is an asshole. The problem with Taleb is that he is right.”—Dan from Prague, Czech Republic (Twitter)

“The most prophetic voice of all . . . [Taleb is] a genuinely significant philosopher . . . someone who is able to change the way we view the structure of the world through the strength, originality and veracity of his ideas alone.”—John Gray, GQ

“Taleb grabs on to core problems that others ignore, or don’t see, and shakes them like an attack dog on a leg.”—Greg from New York (Twitter)

“For my wife and me, Antifragile is an annual reread.”—Colle from Richmond, Virginia (Twitter)

“I read Antifragile four times. First, to get the wisdom to survive. Second, as a memorial statement for Fat Tony. Third, as Das Kapital with correct mathematics. Fourth, as ethics to learn a good way to die.”—Tamitake from Tokyo, Japan (Twitter)

“November . . . time for my annual reread of Antifragile.”—Johann from Vienna, Austria (Twitter)

“[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne.”—The Wall Street Journal

About the Author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent twenty-one years as a risk taker before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical, and (mostly) practical problems with probability. Although he spends most of his time as a flâneur, meditating in cafés across the planet, he is currently Distinguished Professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. His books, part of a multivolume collection called Incerto, have been published in forty-one languages. Taleb has authored more than fifty scholarly papers as backup to Incerto, ranging from international affairs and risk management to statistical physics. Having been described as “a rare mix of courage and erudition,” he is widely recognized as the foremost thinker on probability and uncertainty. Taleb lives mostly in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Why Each One Should Eat His Own Turtles: Equality in Uncertainty

Taste of turtle—Where are the new customers?—Sharia and asymmetry—There are the Swiss, and other people—Rav Safra and the Swiss (but different Swiss)

You who caught the turtles better eat them, goes the ancient adage.

The origin of the expression is as follows. It was said that a group of fishermen caught a large number of turtles. After cooking them, they found out at the communal meal that these sea animals were much less edible than they thought: not many members of the group were willing to eat them. But Mercury happened to be passing by—Mercury was the most multitasking, sort of put-together god, as he was the boss of commerce, abundance, messengers, the underworld, as well as the patron of thieves and brigands and, not surprisingly, luck. The group invited him to join them and offered him the turtles to eat. Detecting that he was only invited to relieve them of the unwanted food, he forced them all to eat the turtles, thus establishing the principle that you need to eat what you feed others.

A Customer Is Born Every Day

I have learned a lesson from my own naive experiences:

Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is “good for you” while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn’t directly affect him.

Of course such advice is usually unsolicited. The asymmetry is when said advice applies to you but not to him—he may be selling you something, or trying to get you to marry his daughter or hire his son-in-law.

Years ago I received a letter from a lecture agent. His letter was clear; it had about ten questions of the type “Do you have the time to field requests?,” “Can you handle the organization of the trip?” The gist of it was that a lecture agent would make my life better and make room for the pursuit of knowledge or whatever else I was about (a deeper understanding of gardening, stamp collections, Mediterranean genetics, or squid-ink recipes) while the burden of the gritty would fall on someone else. And it wasn’t any lecture agent: only he could do all these things; he reads books and can get in the mind of intellectuals (at the time I didn’t feel insulted by being called an intellectual). As is typical with people who volunteer unsolicited advice, I smelled a rat: at no phase in the discussion did he refrain from letting me know that it was “good for me.”

As a sucker, while I didn’t buy into the argument, I ended up doing business with him, letting him handle a booking in the foreign country where he was based. Things went fine until, six years later, I received a letter from the tax authorities of that country. I immediately contacted him to wonder if similar U.S. citizens he had hired incurred such tax conflict, or if he had heard of similar situations. His reply was immediate and curt: “I am not your tax attorney”—volunteering no information as to whether other U.S. customers who hired him because it was “good for them” encountered such a problem.

Indeed, in the dozen or so cases I can pull from memory, it always turns out that what is presented as good for you is not really good for you but certainly good for the other party. As a trader, you learn to identify and deal with upright people, those who inform you that they have something to sell, by explaining that the transaction arises for their own benefit, with such questions as “Do you have an ax?” (meaning an inquiry whether you have a certain interest). Avoid at all costs those who call you to tout a certain product disguised with advice. In fact the story of the turtle is the archetype of the history of transactions between mortals.

I worked once for a U.S. investment bank, one of the prestigious variety, called “white shoe” because the partners were members of hard-to-join golf clubs for proto-aristocrats where they played the game wearing white footwear. As with all such firms, an image of ethics and professionalism was cultivated, emphasized, and protected. But the job of the salespeople (actually, salesmen) on days when they wore black shoes was to “unload” inventory with which traders were “stuffed,” that is, securities they had in excess in their books and needed to get rid of to lower their risk profile. Selling to other dealers was out of the question as professional traders, typically non-golfers, would smell excess inventory and cause the price to drop. So they needed to sell to some client, on what is called the “buy side.” Some traders paid the sales force with (percentage) “points,” a variable compensation that increased with our eagerness to part with securities. Salesmen took clients out to dinner, bought them expensive wine (often, ostensibly the highest on the menu), and got a huge return on the thousands of dollars of restaurant bills by unloading the unwanted stuff on them. One expert salesman candidly explained to me: “If I buy the client, someone working for the finance department of a municipality who buys his suits at some department store in New Jersey, a bottle of $2,000 wine, I own him for the next few months. I can get at least $100,000 profits out of him. Nothing in the mahket gives you such return.”

Salesmen hawked how a given security would be perfect for the client’s portfolio, how they were certain it would rise in price and how the client would suffer great regret if he missed “such an opportunity”—that type of discourse. Salespeople are experts in the art of psychological manipulation, making the client trade, often against his own interest, all the while being happy about it and loving them and their company. One of the top salesmen at the firm, a man with huge charisma who came to work in a chauffeured Rolls Royce, was once asked whether customers didn’t get upset when they got the short end of the stick. “Rip them off, don’t tick them off” was his answer. He also added, “Remember that every day a new customer is born.”

As the Romans were fully aware, one lauds merrily the merchandise to get rid of it.

The Price of Corn in Rhodes

So, “giving advice” as a sales pitch is fundamentally unethical—selling cannot be deemed advice. We can safely settle on that. You can give advice, or you can sell (by advertising the quality of the product), and the two need to be kept separate.

But there is an associated problem in the course of the transactions: how much should the seller reveal to the buyer?

The question “Is it ethical to sell something to someone knowing the price will eventually drop?” is an ancient one—but its solution is no less straightforward. The debate goes back to a disagreement between two stoic philosophers, Diogenes of Babylon and his student Antipater of Tarsus, who took the higher moral ground on asymmetric information and seems to match the ethics endorsed by this author. Not a piece from both authors is extant, but we know quite a bit from secondary sources, or, in the case of Cicero, tertiary. The question was presented as follows, retailed by Cicero in De Officiis. Assume a man brought a large shipment of corn from Alexandria to Rhodes, at a time when corn was expensive in Rhodes because of shortage and famine. Suppose that he also knew that many boats had set sail from Alexandria on their way to Rhodes with similar merchandise. Does he have to inform the Rhodians? How can one act honorably or dishonorably in these circumstances?

We traders had a straightforward answer. Again, “stuffing”—selling quantities to people without informing them that there are large inventories waiting to be sold. An upright trader will not do that to other professional traders; it was a no-no. The penalty was ostracism. But it was sort of permissible to do it to the anonymous market and the faceless nontraders, or those we called “the Swiss,” some random suckers far away. There were people with whom we had a relational rapport, others with whom we had a transactional one. The two were separated by an ethical wall, much like the case with domestic animals that cannot be harmed, while rules on cruelty are lifted when it comes to cockroaches.

Diogenes held that the seller ought to disclose as much as civil law requires. As for Antipater, he believed that everything ought to be disclosed—beyond the law—so that there was nothing that the seller knew that the buyer didn’t know.

Clearly Antipater’s position is more robust—robust being invariant to time, place, situation, and color of the eyes of the participants. Take for now that

The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.

Hence:

Laws come and go; ethics stay.

For the notion of “law” is ambiguous and highly jurisdiction dependent: in the U.S., civil law, thanks to consumer advocates and similar movements, integrates such disclosures, while other countries have different laws. This is particularly visible with securities laws, as there are “front running” regulations and those concerning insider information that make such disclosure mandatory in the U.S., though this wasn’t so for a long time in Europe.

Indeed much of the work of investment banks in my day was to play on regulations, find loopholes in the laws. And, counterintuitively, the more regulations, the easier it was to make money.

Equality in Uncertainty

Which brings us to asymmetry, the core concept behind skin in the game. The question becomes: to what extent can people in a transaction have an informational differential between them? The ancient Mediterranean and, to some extent, the modern world, seem to have converged to Antipater’s position. While we have “buyer beware” (caveat emptor) in the Anglo-Saxon West, the idea is rather new, and never general, often mitigated by lemon laws. (A “lemon” was originally a chronically defective car, say, my convertible Mini, in love with the garage, now generalized to apply to anything that moves).

So, to the question voiced by Cicero in the debate between the two ancient stoics, “If a man knowingly offers for sale wine that is spoiling, ought he to tell his customers?,” the world is getting closer to the position of transparency, not necessarily via regulations as much as thanks to tort laws, and one’s ability to sue for harm in the event a seller deceives him or her. Recall that tort laws put some of the seller’s skin back into the game—which is why they are reviled, hated by corporations. But tort laws have side effects—they should only be used in a nonnaive way, that is, in a way that cannot be gamed. As we will see in the discussion of the visit to the doctor, they will be gamed.

Sharia, in particular the law regulating Islamic transactions and finance, is of interest to us insofar as it preserves some of the lost Mediterranean and Babylonian methods and practices—not to prop up the ego of Saudi princes. It exists at the intersection of Greco-Roman law (as reflected from people in Semitic territories’ contact with the school of law of Berytus), Phoenician trading rules, Babylonian legislations, and Arab tribal commercial customs and, as such, it provides a repository of ancient Mediterranean and Semitic lore. I hence view Sharia as a museum of the history of ideas on symmetry in transactions. Sharia establishes the interdict of gharar, drastic enough to be totally banned in any form of transaction. It is an extremely sophisticated term in decision theory that does not exist in English; it means both uncertainty and deception—my personal take is that it means something beyond informational asymmetry between agents: inequality of uncertainty. Simply, as the aim is for both parties in a transaction to have the same uncertainty facing random outcomes, an asymmetry becomes equivalent to theft. Or more robustly:

No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.

Gharar, like every legalistic construct, will have its flaws; it remains weaker than Antipater’s approach. If only one party in a transaction has certainty all the way through, it is a violation of Sharia. But if there is a weak form of asymmetry, say, someone has inside information which gives an edge in the markets, there is no gharar as there remains enough uncertainty for both parties, given that the price is in the future and only God knows the future. Selling a defective product (where there is certainty as to the defect), on the other hand, is illegal. So the knowledge by the seller of corn in Rhodes in my first example does not fall under gharar, while the second case, that of a defective liquid, would.

As we see, the problem of asymmetry is so complicated that different schools give different ethical solutions, so let us look at the Talmudic approach.

Rav Safra and the Swiss

Jewish ethics on the matter is closer to Antipater than Diogenes in its aims at transparency. Not only should there be transparency concerning the merchandise, but perhaps there has to be transparency concerning what the seller has in mind, what he thinks deep down. The medieval rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (aka Salomon Isaacides), known as “Rashi,” relates the following story. Rav Safra, a third-century Babylonian scholar who was also an active trader, was offering some goods for sale. A buyer came as he was praying in silence, tried to purchase the merchandise at an initial price, and given that the rabbi did not reply, raised the price. But Rav Safra had no intention of selling at a higher price than the initial offer, and felt that he had to honor the initial intention. Now the question: Is Rav Safra obligated to sell at the initial price, or should he take the improved one?

Such total transparency is not absurd and not uncommon in what seems to be a cutthroat world of transactions, my former world of trading. I have frequently faced that problem as a trader and will side in favor of Rav Safra’s action in the debate. Let us follow the logic. Recall the rapacity of salespeople earlier in the chapter. Sometimes I would offer something for sale for, say, $5, but communicated with the client through a salesperson, and the salesperson would come back with an “improvement,” of $5.10. Something never felt right about the extra ten cents. It was, simply, not a sustainable way of doing business. What if the customer subsequently discovered that my initial offer was $5? No compensation is worth the feeling of shame. The overcharge falls in the same category as the act of “stuffing” people with bad merchandise. Now, to apply this to Rav Safra’s story, what if he sold to one client at the marked-up price, and to another one the exact same item for the initial price, and the two buyers happened to know one another? What if they were agents for the same customer?

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition (February 27, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 042528462X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0425284629
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.43 x 1.06 x 9.49 inches

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent more than two decades as a risk taker before becoming a full-time essayist and scholar focusing on practical, philosophical, and mathematical problems with chance, luck, and probability. His focus in on how different systems handle disorder.

He now spends most of his time in the intense seclusion of his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés. In addition to his life as a trader he spent several years as an academic researcher (12 years as Distinguished Professor at New York University's School of Engineering, Dean's Professor at U. Mass Amherst).

He is the author of the Incerto (latin for uncertainty), accessible in any order (Skin in the Game, Antifragile, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, and Fooled by Randomness) plus a technical version, The Technical Incerto (Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails). Taleb has also published close to 55 academic and scholarly papers as a backup, technical footnotes to the Incerto in topics ranging from Statistical Physics and Quantitative Finance to Genetics and International affairs. The Incerto has more than 250 translations in 50 languages.

Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport.

""Imagine someone with the erudition of Pico de la Mirandola, the skepticism of Montaigne, solid mathematical training, a restless globetrotter, polyglot, enjoyer of fine wines, specialist of financial derivatives, irrepressible reader, and irascible to the point of readily slapping a disciple." La Tribune (Paris)

A giant of Mediterranean thought ... Now the hottest thinker in the world", London Times

"The most prophetic voice of all" GQ

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Barren Wuffett

About the real world: think in dynamics, not statics. Think in terms of interactions as well as actions.

Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2018

Verified Purchase

[TLDR] This practical and provocative book is mostly about:
1) Uncertainty and the reliability of knowledge (b/s detection, theory vs practice, cosmetic vs true expertise, etc).
2) Symmetry in human affairs (fairness, justice, responsibility, reciprocity). e.g.: to get the rewards you must also get some of the risks; not let others pay for your mistakes.
3) Information in transactions
4) Rationality in complex systems.

The main aspect of "Skin in the game" (SITG) - a phrase probably made popular by Warren Buffet - is, in Taleb's view, about matching disincentives to incentives. For Taleb, SITG isn’t purely incentives (e.g.: just having a share of some benefits). It is SYMMETRY in both UPSIDE and DOWNSIDE. Taleb makes this important aspect extremely explicit since the very beginning of the book (page-4).

If some actors pocket rewards from a policy they enact or support (without accepting risks/downside), various economists consider it to be a problem of "missing incentives". In contrast, for Taleb, the problem is more fundamentally one of asymmetry: one actor gets the rewards, others are stuck with the risks. Forcing SITG corrects this asymmetry (you cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others as some large corporations do; bankers being bailed out by the public are the antithesis of SITG). Actors, per Taleb, must always bear a symmetric cost when they fail the public (this is SITG!). A fund manager that gets a percentage on wins, but no penalty for losing is incentivised to gamble with his clients funds. Bearing no downside for one's actions, means that one has no "Skin In The Game"

A few insights from the book:

- Having exposure to the real world, with upside and downside, is the best (often the only) way to learn.

- EXPOSURE TO REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES beats Intellectualizing. Employed intellectuals, professional academics, or bureaucrats are rarely in love with thoughts & ideas. They are primarily in love with orthodoxies in their respective fields.

- There are some risks we just cannot afford to take (e.g.: systemic risks). There are some risks we cannot afford to NOT take.

- Intelligentsia have no downside for their actions (no SITG).

- There is no evolution without skin in the game. Note how most academics (Economists, Psychologists, Sociologists, Social Scientists, etc) can be wrong for so long, while MOST businesses cannot (except the likes of Goldman Sachs and others, provided the Government bails them out when they mess up)

- Government intervention, in general, tends to remove SITG, to weaken robustness in complex (economic, social, financial) systems.
- Interventionists don't suffer the consequences of their bad actions, policies, etc

- About the real world: think in dynamics, not statics. Think in high, not low dimensions. Think in terms of interactions as well as actions.

- SITG doesn’t literally mean an eye for an eye. It just means there is a downside large enough (for individuals) to protect the overall system.

- We know far more what is bad than what is good. Therefore, when treating others: no bad actions > good actions as a rule.

- Universal behavior is great on paper, disastrous in practice. Why? We are local and practical animals, sensitive to scale. The small is not the large; the tangible is not the abstract; the emotional is not the logical. Most behaviors do not scale. Family members are not friends and random people on the street are not friends. What's worse: the general and abstract tend to attract self-righteous psychopaths.

- Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there are also penalties for their bad advice.

- The doer wins by doing, not convincing. e.g. if someone is trying to convince you how cool their life is then it is not cool

- How often you forecast correctly is not so important. What matters more is which outcomes you can forecast correctly. The payoffs matter more.

- SITG can help with solving black swan problems. That which has survived over time, with SITG, has proven its robustness.

- People with SITG bring simplicity. People with SITG have no benefit for added complexity. Therefore be careful of people without SITG proposing complex solutions for a problem. They have incentive to seem sophisticated instead of just solving the actual problem

- The average behavior of the market participant will not allow us to understand the general behavior of the market.

- Careful of people who want more regulations as they have incentive to complexify it, so they are more needed.

- People can be largely collaborative except when institutions get in the way.

- Whenever there is a mismatch with "bonus period" (e.g.:1 year) and "statistical blowup" (e.g.:10 years) people will transfer as much risk as possible to the future (get the bonus in 1yr, worry about blowing up much later)

- Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, reading one book twice is often more useful than two books once.

- Professional reviewers tend to want to impress other reviewers while normal people just say their opinions, so be careful of professional reviewers as they have a lack of SITG

- Freedom entails risks, real skin in the game. Freedom is never free

- Data does not imply rigor

- Never pay for complexity of presentation when all you need is results.

- Change for the sake of change is frequently the enemy of progress (inverse of the Lindy effect)

- You can criticize what a person said or what a person meant. One is honorable, the other is embarrassing

- Virtue is what you do when nobody is looking. Virtue is not something you advertise.

- Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

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Mark Edward Bachmann

Survival and Risk

Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2018

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I've read Black Swan, Anti-Fragile and now this latest of Nassim Taleb's books, Skin In The Game. I think he's probably some kind of genius and I confess to being pretty much a Taleb fanboy at this point, but his stuff is never going to be to everyone's taste. His philosophical anarchism governs his literary style which makes a mockery out of structure. He also writes with a huge chip on his shoulder, which doesn't bother me so much because I generally share his biases, but many people will be right to take offence. It would make him happy knowing they're getting the point.

One of his favorite recurring phrases is "F*** Y** money", by which he means the enviable state of possessing sufficient wealth not to have to take orders or even direction from anybody. I don't know anything about Taleb's finances, but he clearly thinks he enjoys F*** Y** celebrity nowadays, because he runs rough-shod over any semblance of editorial control. He says exactly what he wants to say without anything much more than rudimentary self-imposed filtering. Luckily he's economical with words and doesn't indulge himself in empty verbiage, so even though he might benefit from some macro-editing, he doesn't really need his copy checked.

Taleb's essential thinking is consistent through all his books. He's a spiritual survivalist who believes that ongoing human existence requires that we continuously take manageable risks in life and adapt rationally to the consequences. Anything that gets in the way of this process is an existential threat and becomes the focus of Taleb's scorn. He's a bottom-up kind of guy and distains anything top-down. Hence, he hates government and corporate bureaucrats, bankers, macro-economists, socialists, Pentagon generals and anyone else he sees as dodging personal risk while creating structures that foist risk on the society around them. The people he respects are self-funding capitalists, experimental scientists, front-line soldiers and anyone who lives by putting his ideas or body into harm's way every day and using the results as his guide for survival the following day. These are the people with "skin in the game" who drive human evolution.

I had always been curious about Taleb's religious beliefs, and he finally addresses the subject briefly in this book. He identifies himself as an Orthodox Christian, and devotes a short section to explicating Christianity's central drama, which is Christ's self-sacrifice and eventual resurrection. Taleb being Taleb of course re-shapes this story to his own purpose. He describes Jesus as the archetypal skin-in-the-game figure who puts everything on the line and pays the ultimate price before earning his passage safely through to the other side. He takes us with him if we follow his lead and put our own skin into the game. The Roman and Jewish bureaucrats of Christ's day take their appropriate places in Taleb's gallery of fools.

Taleb began his professional life as an options trader on Wall Street, and the language of finance remains central to his worldview. He sees his core intellectual discipline now as probability theory and uses this mode of thought as a quantitative framework for understanding finance and just about everything else. He has what amounts to a dual publishing career at this point and manages a second body of highly technical treatises which give mathematical expression to the same ideas he writes about in his popular books. Skin In The Game itself has a short technical appendix. Even though I myself have a background in finance, I can't follow any of this stuff. I've always suspected financial writers and economists who employ a lot of obscure math are covering up the shallowness of their underlying ideas. I still believe this to be true in many cases, but Taleb is among the last people I would accuse of such subterfuge. I'm sure his formulas make sense to anyone with the patience to follow them.

I recommend Skin In The Game to readers who are prepared for what they're getting.

21 people found this helpful

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Tom Berard

Interesting Reading

Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2024

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The author delves into many difficult thought processes and situations. I definitely had to take my time reading it. It was helpful to have my smart phone handy to look up subjects and definitions. Not an easy read, but thought provoking.

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Miguel

A must read

Reviewed in Mexico on May 30, 2023

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Asymmetries in daily life with different examples, you may agree or not, nevertheless all the topics are relevant and well presented.

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Vladas Sadauskas

Good

Reviewed in Germany on March 24, 2024

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Good

Helena

Vision globale

Reviewed in France on April 12, 2023

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Si on va voir mieux que ce qu'on nous offrent les médias traditionnels

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Amazon Customer

Taleb, brillante.

Reviewed in Spain on October 21, 2021

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Brillante

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Lucas Antony

Decisões e riscos

Reviewed in Brazil on July 5, 2019

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Mais um excelente livro do Taleb. O argumento central é que a dissociação entre ações dos tomadores de decisões (em governos, empresas, médicos, etc) e consequências diretas e pessoais pelos seus atos gera riscos sistêmicos. Quando, por exemplo, um CEO não perde seu bônus anual se a companhia for mal, ou condenada por corrupção, ou quando alguém dá um conselho que não segue.

Ele utiliza alguns conceitos explorados em seus livros anteriores, embora seja possível a compreensão do texto sem a leitura prévia de Cisne Negro e Antifrágil.

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Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto) Hardcover – February 27, 2018

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