Eher zufällig stieß ich auf der Website des Guardian auf einen Brief* von Nassim Nicholas Taleb an den britischer Oppositionsführer David Cameron. Taleb gibt darin eine Kurzfassung seiner wichtigsten Thesen sowie einiger Handlungsempfehlung für die Politik, die ich nicht alle teile. Außerdem übt er deutliche Kritik an der Wirtschaftspolitik der Obama-Administration. Ein Blick in Auszüge des auch noch unterhaltsamen Schreibens:
What is a Black Swan? It is a low-probability, high-impact event that, because of its rarity and the instability of the environment, cannot be scientifically evaluated in terms of risk and return. Although Black Swans are rarely predicted, they are retrospectively seen as having been anticipated, which makes us overestimate our abilities to see them coming. Black Swans can emerge as a result of our intellectual arrogance and our ignorance of our limitations. Some elements of the future are simply beyond our grasp.
“Be careful, too, of the so-called science of economics. Economists have been no better in their predictions than cab drivers. We have an "expert" problem, in which the expert provides you with misplaced confidence, but no information. Because we think, correctly, that the dermatologist, the baker, the chemist are true experts (they know more about their respective subjects than the rest of us), we swallow the canard that the economists at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve are also experts, without checking their record. This reliance on faux experts is, for the most part, what got us here.”
“If we are to have regulators, we need them to operate along conservative lines and conserve the rich knowledge and understanding of risk transmitted through generations of practice, of trial and error. We replaced the heuristics of the elders with arrogant (and incompetent) beliefs, breaking, in the name of science, the chain of knowledge. Old, conservative bankers and traders have been replaced by keen young mathematical analysts, yet anyone who listened to a grandmother who survived the Depression would have been warned against debt and been better prepared than Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, respectively chairman and former chairman of America’s Federal Reserve.”
Quelle der Zitate: Cameron dare not copy Obama’s disastrous economic policies
Weitere Artikel im Blick Log zu Taleb
Videos: Nassim Taleb und Nouriel Roubini im Economic Manhattan Project
Investieren mit Schwarzen Schwänen: Taleb im Interview
Reflektionen von Nassim N. Taleb und Daniel Kahneman zur Finanzkrise
Video: Shiller und Taleb zur Finanzkrise beim New Yorker
Risikomanagement mit Schwarzen Schwänen: Talebs zehn Prinzipien zur Wirtschaftskrise
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