Skin in the Game (book)
2018 non-fiction work by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (acronymed: SITG) is a 2018 nonfiction book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former options trader with a background in the mathematics of probability and statistics.
Taleb's thesis is that skin in the game—i.e., having a shared risk when taking a major decision—is necessary for fairness, commercial efficiency, and risk management, as well as being necessary to understand the world. The book is part of Taleb's multi-volume philosophical essay on uncertainty, titled the Incerto, which also includes Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007–2010), The Bed of Procrustes (2010–2016), and Antifragile (2012). The book is dedicated to "two men of courage": Ron Paul, "a Roman among Greeks"; and Ralph Nader, "Greco-Phoenician saint".
Asymmetry and missing incentives
If an actor pockets some rewards from a policy they enact or support without accepting any of the risks, economists consider it to be a problem of "missing incentives". In contrast, to Taleb, the problem is more fundamentally one of asymmetry: one actor gets the rewards, the other is stuck with the risks.
Taleb argues that "For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do... Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations."
The centrality of negative incentives
Actors – per Taleb – must bear a cost when they fail the public. A fund manager that gets a percentage on wins, but no penalty for losing, is incentivized to gamble with his clients' funds.
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