What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.
Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.
When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.
I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal.
I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.
When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.
Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.
We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.
Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.
I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.
