진정한 평등은 확률의 평등이다. 시스템이 참가자에게 위험을 부담하게 하면 부패하지 않는다.

 

탈레브는 불평등이 문제가 아니라, 가난한 사람이 부자가 되고, 부자가 가난해지는 그런 시스템의 부재가 진정한 문제의 본질이라고 말한다. 기회가 있으면 가난한 사람도 부자가 될 수 있어야 하고, 부자 역시 사업하다 망하면 가난뱅이가 되어야 한다. 하지만 관료들이 각종 규제와 부패의 사슬로 가난한사람들은 영원히 가난뱅이로 머물러 있게 하고, 부자는 내내 부자로 살게 하고 있다.

 

<Inequality and Skin in the Game>

탈레브의 글 발췌

 

 

In this chapter I will propose that effectively what people resent –or should resent –is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting the income or wealth bracket, and getting to the soup kitchen. Again, on that account, the detractors of Donald Trump, when he was a candidate, failed to realize that, by advertising his episode of bankruptcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, they removed the resentment (the second type of inequality) one may have towards him. There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money.

 

Take also the two following remarks:

 

True equality is equality in probability

 

and

 

Skin in the game prevents systems from rotting

 

 

The Static and the Dynamic

 

Visibly, a problem with economists (particularly those who never really worked in the real world) is that they have mental difficulties with things that move and are unable to consider that things that move have different attributes from things that don’t –it may be trivial but reread Chapter [3] on IYIs if you are not convinced. That’s the reason complexity theory and fat tails are foreign to most of them; they also have (severe) difficulties with the mathematical and conceptual intuitions required for deeper probability theory. Blindness to ergodicity which we will define a few paragraphs down, is indeed in my opinion the best marker separating a genuine scholar who understands something about the world, from an academic hack who partakes of a ritualistic paper writing.

 

Dynamic (ergodic) inequality takes into account the entire future and past life

 

 

You do not create dynamic equality just by raising the level of those at the bottom, but rather by making the rich rotate –or by forcing people to incur the possibility of creating an opening.

 

The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the one percent

 

 

Our condition here is stronger than mere income mobility. 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.

 

Let me explain ergodicity –something that we said is foreign to the intelligentsia; we will devote an entire section as we will see it cancels most crucial psychological experiments related to probability and rationality. Take a cross sectional picture of the U.S. population. You have, say, a minority of millionaires in the one percent, some overweight, some tall, some humorous. You also have a high majority of people in the lower middle class, school yoga instructors, baking experts, gardening consultants, spreadsheet theoreticians, dancing advisors, and piano repairpersons. Take the percentages of each income or wealth bracket (note that income inequality is flatter than that of wealth). Perfect ergodicity means that each one of us, should he live forever, would spend the proportion of time in the economic conditions of segments of that 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 percent.

 

 

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, as they say, 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 rich. 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.

 

 

Pikketism and the Revolt of the Mandarin Class

 

Any form of control of the wealth process –typically instigated by bureaucrats –tended to lock people with privileges in their state of entitlement. So the solution was to allow the system to destroy the strong, something that worked best in the United States.

 

Simply, it looks like it is the university professors (who have arrived) and people who have permanent stability of income, in the form of tenure, governmental or academic, who bought heavily in the argument. From the conversations, I became convinced that these people who counterfactual upwards (i.e. compare themselves to those richer) wanted to actively dispossess the rich. As will all communist movements, it is often the bourgeois or clerical classes that buy first into the argument.