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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (49227)	2/21/2013 1:22:51 PM
From: Tommaso	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71456

I have now been reading Taleb's "Antifragile." To me, it seems that sometimes he knows what he is talking about and sometimes he does not have a clue. For an example of the latter, some sweeping statements he makes about France, especially the France of about 1960, the year he was born. Since he did not exist in 1959, it is hard to see how he can speak as if he had seen France from the inside at that time. He has not made up for this by learning about the country from books or any other sources. I am not sure that his general argument is really any more original than simply to say, "Not letting a small problem solve itself can result in a much bigger problem." Perhaps because he has had unfortunate experiences with bad doctors, he seems to favor postponing medical treatment. But I guess his idea that a lot of small failures can prevent one really serious big failure is pretty applicable to the past decade--an updated view of laissez-faire. Maybe another way to state his point might be to say, "It is hard to learn from experience if someone is preventing you from having that experience"--i.e. Greenspan's and Bernanke's efforts to compel as much as possible to run smoothly. I will keep plugging at the book and see what I get out of it; Kindle says I am 28% through it so far.