A review of Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

REVIEWED BY CHRIS EDWARDS

Random House, New York. 304 pp. $30. SBN-13: 978-0425284629

SOMETIMES YOU CAN JUDGE A BOOK BY its cover. The image under the title of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, presents the would-be reader with a barbell holding large weights on one side and smaller weights on the other. The mixed metaphor (one might expect to see a reference to skin and/or a game) sets the tone for an uneven book that’s heavy on personal attacks and vendettas but light on substance.

Taleb achieved authorial fame with 2008’s Black Swan, and followed that work with Antifragile in 2012. The first book showed how models based on predictive analytics can fail dramatically when unlikely events occur that crash the system. It became popular in no small part because of the financial crisis in the housing sector that occurred the same year. It’s not clear what the connection was, though, since the housing crash came as a result of consistent flaws in the lending system and not as a singular unlikely event. Antifragile put forth the thesis that universities exist to formalize ideas and processes that actually evolved in the wild where real people work.

Skin in the Game stems from these books. Taleb’s new thesis is that people who make decisions and predictions should share in the pain and/or rewards that come as an outcome of those decisions. In the Introduction, he writes “If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price of your mistakes. If you inflict risk on others, and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it. Just as you should treat others the way you’d like to be treated, you would like to share the responsibility for events without unfairness and inequity” (p. 4).