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Mobility means that someone can become rich. The no-absorbing-barrier condition means that someone who is rich should never be certain to stay rich.
Perfect ergodicity means that each one of us, should he live forever, would spend a proportion of time in the economic conditions of the entire cross-section: out of, say, a century, an average of sixty years in the lower middle class, ten years in the upper middle class, twenty years in the blue-collar class,
and perhaps one single year in the one
The term absorption is derived from particles that, when they hit an obstacle, get absorbed or stick to it. An absorbing barrier is like a trap, once in, you can’t get out, good or bad. A person gets rich by some process, then, having arrived, he stays rich. And if someone enters the lower middle class (from above), he will never have the chance to exit from it and become rich should he want to, of course—hence will be justified to resent the
You will notice that where the state is large, people at the top tend to have little downward mobility—in such places as France, the state is chummy with large corporations and protects their executives and shareholders from experiencing such descent; it even encourages their ascent.
The problem is never the problem; it is how people handle it.
Aristotle himself was building on Hesiod: cobbler envies cobbler, carpenter envies carpenter. Later, Jean de La Bruyère wrote that jealousy is to be found within the same art, talent, and
the idea that people’s ethical rules are not universal; they vary according to whether someone is “Swiss,” that is, an outsider or not.
So I’ve discovered, with experience, that when you buy a thick book with tons of graphs and tables used to prove a point, you should be suspicious.
Rich people in public office have shown some evidence of lack of total incompetence—success may come from randomness, of course, but we at least have a hint of some skill in the real world, some evidence that the person has dealt with reality. This is of course conditional on the person having had skin in the game—and it is better if the person felt a blowup, has experienced at least once the loss of part of his or her fortune and the angst associated with
It is downright unethical to use public office for enrichment.
fragility as sensitivity to disorder: the porcelain owl sitting in front of me on the writing desk, as I am writing these lines, wants tranquility. It dislikes shocks, disorder, variations, earthquakes, mishandling by dust-phobic cleaning service operators, travel in a suitcase transiting through Terminal 5 in Heathrow, and shelling by Saudi Barbaria–sponsored Islamist militias.
crucially, time is equivalent to disorder, and resistance to the ravages of time, that is, what we gloriously call survival, is the ability to handle disorder.
For time operates through skin in the game. Things that have survived are hinting to us ex post that they have some robustness—conditional on their being exposed to harm.
There are two ways things handle time. First, there is aging and perishability: things die because they have a biological clock, what we call senescence. Second, there is hazard, the rate of accidents. What we witness in physical life is the combination of the two: when you are old and fragile, you don’t handle accidents very well. These accidents don’t have to be external, like falling from a ladder or being attacked by a bear; they can also be internal, from random malfunctioning of your organs or circulation.
Only the nonperishable can be Lindy. When it comes to ideas, books, technologies, procedures, institutions, and political systems under Lindy, there is no intrinsic aging and perishability.
“Just as, when a businessman and author you are judged by other businessmen and authors, here as an academic you are judged by other academics. Life is about peer assessment.”
“If people over here like you, you are doing something wrong.”
You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.
So, my only real judge being time, it is the stability and robustness of the readership (that is, future readers) that counts. The fashion-oriented steady reader of the most recently reviewed book in The New York Times is of no interest to me. And as a risk taker, only time counts—for I could fool my accountant with steady earnings with a lot of hidden risk, but time will eventually reveal them. Being reviewed or assessed by others matters if and only if one is subjected to the judgment of future—not just present—others.
Contemporary peers are valuable collaborators, not final judges.
take as much as you can, under the condition that you give more than you take.
Someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bull***t vendor.
The longer an idea has been around without being falsified, the longer its future life expectancy.
When results come from dealing directly with reality rather than through the agency of commentators, image matters less, even if it correlates to skills. But image matters quite a bit when there is hierarchy and standardized “job evaluation.”
executives are different from entrepreneurs and are supposed to look like actors.
As I am writing these lines, a neighbor in my ancestral village (and like almost everyone there, a remote relative), who led a modest but comfortable life, ate food he grew by himself, drank his own pastis (arak), that sort of thing, left an estate of a hundred million dollars, a hundred times what one would have expected him to leave. So the next time you randomly pick a novel, avoid the one with the author photo representing a pensive man with an ascot standing in front of wall-to-wall bookshelves.
In any type of activity or business divorced from the direct filter of skin in the game, the great majority of people know the jargon, play the part, and are intimate with the cosmetic details, but are clueless about the subject.
Don’t think that beautiful apples taste better, goes the Latin
And if anything characterizes today’s America, it is economic risk taking, thanks to a happy transfer of martial values to business and commerce in Anglo-Saxon society—remarkably, traditional Arabic culture also puts the same emphasis on the honor of economic risk-taking.
Never pay for complexity of presentation when all you need is results.
we waste more than a third of our food supply, and the gains from simple improvement in distribution would far outweigh those from modification of supply.
while the presence of skin in the game does away with the cosmetic, its absence causes multiplicative nonsense.
You can’t fool people more than twice.
Lycurgus, the Spartan lawmaker, responded to a suggestion to allow democracy there, saying “begin with your own family.”
It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake. If I were to describe the perfect virtuous act, it would be to take an uncomfortable position, one penalized by the common discourse.
Sticking up for truth when it is unpopular is far more of a virtue, because it costs you something—your reputation.
1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.
I conjecture that when you leave people alone, they tend to settle for practical reasons.
No peace proceeds from bureaucratic ink. If you want peace, make people trade, as they have done for millennia.
Learning from the Russian school of probability makes one conscious of the need to think in terms of one-sided inequalities: what is absent from the data should be taken into account—absence of Black Swans in the record doesn’t mean these were not there.
Reading a history book, without putting its events in perspective, offers a similar bias to reading an account of life in New York seen from an emergency room at Bellevue Hospital.
The expression “Better the turban of the Turk than the tiara of the Pope!” originated with the Grand Duke Lucas Notaras, who negotiated a friendship treaty with the Ottomans, and was repeated at various stages in history.
core of the book: rationality and risk bearing.
mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words.
labels—outside of poetry, beware the verbalistic, that archenemy of knowledge.
The difference is marked in that Christian Aramaic uses different words: din for religion and nomous (from the Greek) for law. Jesus, with his imperative “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” separated the holy and the profane: Christianity was for another domain, “the kingdom to come,” only merging with this one in the eschaton.* Neither Islam nor Judaism have a marked separation between holy and profane.
For Orthodox and Catholic Christians, religion is largely aesthetics, pomp, and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief without aesthetics, pomp, or law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists, and Hindus, religion is practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, a cosmogony). So when Hindus talk about the Hindu “religion,” it doesn’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani, and would certainly mean something different to a Persian.
