Over the past twenty-five hundred years of recorded ideas, only fools and Platonists (or, worse, the species called central bankers) have believed in engineered utopias. We will see in the section on the Fourth Quadrant that the idea is not to correct mistakes and eliminate randomness from social and economic life through monetary policy, subsidies, and so on. The idea is simply to let human mistakes and miscalculations remain confined, and to prevent their spreading through the system, as Mother Nature does. Reducing volatility and ordinary randomness increases exposure to Black Swans—it
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