Skin in the Game Read online

  Imagine people with similar mental handicaps, people who don’t understand asymmetry, piloting planes. Incompetent pilots, those who cannot learn from experience, or don’t mind taking risks they don’t understand, may kill many. But they will themselves end up at the bottom of, say, the Bermuda Triangle, and cease to represent a threat to others and mankind. Not here.

  So we end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating modernist slogans stripped of all depth (for instance, they keep using the term “democracy” while encouraging headcutters; democracy is something they read about in graduate studies). In general, when you hear someone invoking abstract modernistic notions, you can assume that they got some education (but not enough, or in the wrong discipline) and have too little accountability.

  Now some innocent people—Ezidis, Christian minorities in the Near (and Middle) East, Mandeans, Syrians, Iraqis, and Libyans—had to pay a price for the mistakes of these interventionistas currently sitting in comfortable air-conditioned offices. This, we will see, violates the very notion of justice from its prebiblical, Babylonian inception—as well as the ethical structure, that underlying matrix thanks to which humanity has survived.

  The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.

  Further,

  We have always been crazy but weren’t skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.

  We will return to the “peacemaking” interventionistas, and examine how their peace processes create deadlocks, as with the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

  WARLORDS ARE STILL AROUND

  This idea of skin in the game is woven into history: historically, all warlords and warmongers were warriors themselves, and, with a few curious exceptions, societies were run by risk takers, not risk transferors.

  Prominent people took risks—considerably more risks than ordinary citizens. The Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, about whom much later, died on the battlefield fighting in the never-ending war on the Persian frontier—while emperor. One may only speculate about Julius Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon, owing to the usual legend-building by historians, but here the proof is stark. There is no better historical evidence of an emperor taking a frontline position in battle than a Persian spear lodged in his chest (Julian omitted to wear protective armor). One of his predecessors, Valerian, was captured on the same frontier, and was said to have been used as a human footstool by the Persian Shapur when mounting his horse. And the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologus, was last seen when he removed his purple toga, then joined Ioannis Dalmatus and his cousin Theophilus Palaeologus to charge Turkish troops with their swords above their heads, proudly facing certain death. Yet legend has it that Constantine had been offered a deal in the event of a surrender. Such deals are not for self-respecting kings.

  These are not isolated anecdotes. The statistical reasoner in this author is quite convinced: less than a third of Roman emperors died in their beds—and one can argue that given that only few of these died of really old age, had they lived longer, they would have fallen either to a coup or in battle.

  Even today, monarchs derive their legitimacy from a social contract that requires physical risk-taking. The British Royal family made sure that one of its scions, Prince Andrew, took more risks than “commoners” during the Falkland war of 1982, his helicopter being in the front line. Why? Because noblesse oblige; the very status of a lord has been traditionally derived from protecting others, trading personal risk for prominence—and they happened to still remember that contract. You can’t be a lord if you aren’t a lord.

  THE BOB RUBIN TRADE

  Some think that freeing ourselves from having warriors at the top means civilization and progress. It does not. Meanwhile,

  Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

  And, one may ask, what can we do since a centralized system will necessarily need people who are not directly exposed to the cost of errors?

  Well, we have no choice but to decentralize or, more politely, to localize; to have fewer of these immune decision makers.

  Decentralization is based on the simple notion that it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t.

  Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.

  But not to worry, if we do not decentralize and distribute responsibility, it will happen by itself, the hard way: a system that doesn’t have a mechanism of skin in the game, with a buildup of imbalances, will eventually blow up and self-repair that way. If it survives.

  For instance, bank blowups came in 2008 because of the accumulation of hidden and asymmetric risks in the system: bankers, master risk transferors, could make steady money from a certain class of concealed explosive risks, use academic risk models that don’t work except on paper (because academics know practically nothing about risk), then invoke uncertainty after a blowup (that same unseen and unforecastable Black Swan and that same very, very stubborn author), and keep past income—what I have called the Bob Rubin trade.

  The Bob Rubin trade? Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, one of those who sign their names on the banknote you just used to pay for coffee, collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check—he invoked uncertainty as an excuse. Heads he wins, tails he shouts “Black Swan.” Nor did Rubin acknowledge that he transferred risk to taxpayers: Spanish grammar specialists, assistant schoolteachers, supervisors in tin can factories, vegetarian nutrition advisors, and clerks for assistant district attorneys were “stopping him out,” that is, taking his risks and paying for his losses. But the worst casualty has been free markets, as the public, already prone to hating financiers, started conflating free markets and higher order forms of corruption and cronyism, when in fact it is the exact opposite: it is government, not markets, that makes these things possible by the mechanisms of bailouts. It is not just bailouts: government interference in general tends to remove skin in the game.

  The good news is that in spite of the efforts of a complicit Obama administration that wanted to protect the game and the rent-seeking bankers,*3 the risk-taking business started moving toward small independent structures known as hedge funds. The move took place mostly because of the overbureaucratization of the system as paper shufflers (who think work is mostly about paper shuffling) overburdened the banks with rules—but somehow, in the thousands of pages of additional regulations, they avoided considering skin in the game. In the decentralized hedge fund space, on the other hand, owner-operators have at least half of their net worth in the funds, making them relatively more exposed than any of their customers, and they personally go down with the ship.

  SYSTEMS LEARN BY REMOVING

  Now, if you are going to highlight only one single section from this book, here is the one. The interventionista case is central to our story because it shows how absence of skin in the game has both ethical and epistemological effects (i.e., related to knowledge). We saw that interventionistas don’t learn because they are not the victims of their mistakes, and, as we hinted at with pathemata mathemata:

  The same mechanism of transferring risk also impedes learning.

  More practically,

  You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.

  Actually, to be precise, reality doesn’t care about winning arguments: survival is what matters.

  For

  The curse of modernity is that we are increasi
ngly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding,

  or better at explaining than doing.

  So learning isn’t quite what we teach inmates inside the high-security prisons called schools. In biology, learning is something that, through the filter of intergenerational selection, gets imprinted at the cellular level—skin in the game, I insist, is more filter than deterrence. Evolution can only happen if risk of extinction is present. Further,

  There is no evolution without skin in the game.

  This last point is quite obvious, but I keep seeing academics with no skin in the game defend evolution while at the same time rejecting skin in the game and risk sharing. They refuse the notion of design by a creator who knows everything, while, at the same time, want to impose human design as if they knew all the consequences. In general, the more people worship the sacrosanct state (or, equivalently, large corporations), the more they hate skin in the game. The more they believe in their ability to forecast, the more they hate skin in the game. The more they wear suits and ties, the more they hate skin in the game.

  Returning to our interventionistas, we saw that people don’t learn so much from their—and other people’s—mistakes; rather it is the system that learns by selecting those less prone to a certain class of mistakes and eliminating others.

  Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.*4

  Many bad pilots, as we mentioned, are currently in the bottom of the Atlantic, many dangerous bad drivers are in the local quiet cemetery with nice walkways bordered by trees. Transportation didn’t get safer just because people learn from errors, but because the system does. The experience of the system is different from that of individuals; it is grounded in filtering.

  To summarize so far,

  Skin in the game keeps human hubris in check.

  Let us now go deeper with the second part of the prologue, and consider the notion of symmetry.

  *1 Interventionistas have in common one main attribute: they are usually not weight lifters.

  *2 Playing with others’ lives.

  *3 Rent-seeking is trying to use protective regulations or “rights” to derive income without adding anything to economic activity, not increasing the wealth of others. As Fat Tony (who will be introduced a few pages down) would define it, it is like being forced to pay protection money to the Mafia without getting the economic benefits of protection.

  *4 Via negativa: the principle that we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops. This is discussed in some depth in Antifragile.

  Meta-experts judged by meta-meta-experts—Prostitutes, nonprostitutes, and amateurs—The French have this thing with Hammurabi—Dumas is always an exception

  I. FROM HAMMURABI TO KANT

  Skin-in-the-game-style symmetry, until the recent intellectualization of life, had been implicitly considered the principal rule for organized society, even for any form of collective life in which one encounters or deals with others more than once. The rule had to even precede human settlement since it prevails in a sophisticated, very sophisticated, form in the animal kingdom. Or, to rephrase, it had to prevail there or life would have been extinct—risk transfer blows up systems. And the very idea of law, divine or otherwise, resides in fixing imbalances and remedying such asymmetries.

  Let us briefly travel the road from Hammurabi to Kant, where the rule gets refined along with civilized life.

  Hammurabi in Paris

  Hammurabi’s law was posted on a basalt stele around 3,800 years ago in a central public place in Babylon, so every literate person could read it, or, rather, read it to others who couldn’t read. It contains 282 laws and is deemed to be the first codification of our rule extant. The code has one central theme: it establishes symmetries between people in a transaction, so nobody can transfer hidden tail risk, or Bob Rubin–style risks. Yes, the Bob Rubin trade is 3,800 years old, as old as civilization, and so are the rules to counter it.

  What is a tail? Take for now that it is an extreme event of low frequency. It is called a “tail” because, in drawings of bell-curve style frequencies, it is located to the extreme left or right (being of low frequency), and for some reason beyond my immediate understanding, people started calling that a “tail” and the term stuck.

  Hammurabi’s best known injunction is as follows: “If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house—the builder shall be put to death.”

  For, as with financial traders, the best place to hide risks is “in the corners,” in burying vulnerabilities to rare events that only the architect (or the trader) can detect—the idea being to be far away in time and place when blowups happen. As one old alcoholic ruddy-faced English banker told me when I graduated from school, volunteering career advice: “I give long-term loans only. When they mature I want to be long gone. And only reachable long distance.” He worked for international banks and survived playing his trick by changing country every five years, and, from what I recall, he also changed wives every ten years and banks every twelve. But he didn’t have to go hide very far or very deeply underground: nobody until very recently clawed back (that is, reclaimed) the past bonuses of bankers when something subsequently went wrong. And, not unexpectedly, it was the Swiss who started clawing back, in 2008.

  The well-known lex talionis, “an eye for one eye,” comes from Hammurabi’s rule. It is metaphorical, not literal: you don’t have to actually remove an eye—hence the rule is much more flexible than it appears at first glance. For, in a famous Talmudic discussion (in Bava Kamma), a rabbi argues that if one followed the letter, the one-eyed would only pay half the punishment if he blinds a two-eyed person, and the blind would go scot-free. Or what if a small person kills a hero? Likewise, you do not need to amputate the leg of the reckless doctor who cut the wrong leg: the tort system, through courts, not regulation, thanks to the efforts of Ralph Nader, will impose some penalty, enough to protect consumers and citizens from powerful institutions. Clearly the legal system might produce some irritants (particularly with torts) and has its class of rent-seekers, but we are vastly better off complaining about lawyers than complaining about not having them.

  More practically, some economists have been trying to blame me for wanting to reverse the bankruptcy protection offered in modern times; some even accused me of wanting to bring back the guillotine for bankers. I am not that literal: it is just the matter of inflicting some penalty, just enough to make the Bob Rubin trade less attractive, and protect the public.

  Now, for some reason that escapes me, one of those strange things one finds only in France, Hammurabi’s code, a stele in gray-black basalt, resides in the Louvre Museum in Paris. And the French, who normally know about a lot of things we don’t know much about, don’t seem to know about it; only Korean visitors with selfie sticks appear to have heard of the place.

  On my penultimate pilgrimage to the site, I happened to lecture French financiers in a conference room in the museum building about the ideas of this book, and the notion of skin in the game. I was speaking right after the man who, in spite of looks (and personality) quite similar to those found in Mesopotamian statues, epitomizes absence of skin in the game: former Federal Reserve governor Ben Bernanke. To my sorrow, when I publicly questioned the audience, using the irony of the situation, namely that almost four millennia ago we were sort of more sophisticated with these things, and that the monument was 300 feet from where I was lecturing, nobody in the room, in spite of the high culture of French financiers, figured out what I was talking about. Nobody was aware of Hammurabi beyond some player in Mesopotamian geopolitics, or suspected his connection to s
kin in the game and the accountability of bankers.

  Table 1 shows the progression of the rules of symmetry from Hammurabi onward, so let us climb the ladder.

  Silver Beats Gold

  We rapidly go through the rules to the right of Hammurabi. Leviticus is a sweetening of Hammurabi’s rule. The Golden Rule wants you to Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. The more robust Silver Rule says Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you. More robust? How? Why is the Silver Rule more robust?

  First, it tells you to mind your own business and not decide what is “good” for others. We know with much more clarity what is bad than what is good. The Silver Rule can be seen as the Negative Golden Rule, and as I am shown by my Calabrese (and Calabrese-speaking) barber every three weeks, via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by addition*1).

  Now a word about the “others” in treat others. “You” can be singular or plural, hence it can designate an individual, a basketball team, or the Northeast Association of Calabrese-Speaking Barbers. Same with the “others.” The idea is fractal, in the sense that it works at all scales: humans, tribes, societies, groups of societies, countries, etc., assuming each one is a separate standalone unit and can deal with other counterparts as such. Just as individuals should treat others the way they would like to be treated (or avoid being mistreated), families as units should treat other families in the same way. And, something that makes the interventionistas of Prologue 1 even more distasteful, so should countries. For Isocrates, the wise Athenian orator, warned us as early as the fifth century B.C. that nations should treat other nations according to the Silver Rule. He wrote: