Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"The great economist Ariel Rubinstein... refuses to claim that his knowledge of theoretical matters can be translated -- by him -- into anything directly practical. To him, economics is like a fable -- a fable writer is there to stimulate ideas, indirectly inspire practice perhaps, but certainly not to direct or determine practice. Theory should stay independent from practice and vice versa -- and we should not extract academic economists from their campuses and put them in positions of decision making." -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile , pp. 211-212.

"If something that does not make sense to you (say, religion -- if you are an atheist -- or some other age-old habit or practice called irrational); if that something has been around for a very, very long time, then, irrational or not, you can expect it to stick around much longer, and outlive those who call for its demise." -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile , p. 335

For those of you who haven't read Antifragile , Taleb's final book in his Incerto quartet, it is very much worth your time. It's central idea is simple: uncertainty and ups and downs are an essential part of life, not accidents to be corrected. But what's more, the attempt to eliminate them and make life all pleasant smoothness (like an automobile ride in a luxury car commercial) produces fragility . For my Austrian friends, you will like the fact that Taleb takes the business cycle as a paradigmatic case: by trying to smooth out all ups and downs in business activity, central banks produce huge crashes like 1929-1932 and 2007-2008. But this principle applies in many, many other domains of life as well. In fact, once you see it as a general principle, you start finding it everywhere. This morning I was thinking about it in terms of psychiatric drugs. The idea behind these drugs is that no one should ever feel bad. Just look at the TV ads: once you get hooked on thes...