PAUL SOLMAN: What risk are they posing to us now? NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: I can see some severe distortions now from that class of people deciding to “fix” things and, effectively, not paying the price. PAUL SOLMAN: Do you see some kind of collapse on the horizon? you have a class of people who inflict risk on others without being affected by the outcome, that class of people is going to disrupt the system, causing some kind of collapse. You could not rise in a senate if you didn’t have war experience. In the past, historically, warmongers were soldiers. Then, the same people make the same mistake with Libya and then now currently with Syria, the warmongers. They’re not committed with living or owning the toy. The thing falls apart, and they walk away from it. The first one, and the most obvious one, is people who intervene in Iraq, thinking, “Hey, we’re going to bring democracy,” or some abstract concept. Decision-makers who can drag you into intervention, can drag you into policies that cosmetically feel good, but eventually, somebody pays a price and it’s not them. PAUL SOLMAN: The no-skin-in-the-game class? NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: It’s that rise of the class, the no-skin-in-the-game class in decision-making.

Plus, there are a bunch of things that have been developing that I’m not comfortable with, developing over, say, the least 20 years, but mostly the last 10 years, I’m not comfortable with. NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: The point is, the system is fragile because we had a lot of debt.

PAUL SOLMAN: Are there black swans on the horizon now? What are you betting on? Owning my own risk, as I write in the book. “People don’t understand that we’re not learning from previous crises to force people to have skin in the game…”

The black swan skin in the game