Before writing his four-volume Incerto—an “investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making when we don’t understand the world”—the Lebanese-born Nassim Nicholas Taleb held trading positions with firms in New York and London and operated as a floor trader in Chicago. He is a distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University.
Miscellany
“People think this pandemic is an accident,” wrote Nassim Nicholas Taleb in May 2020 of the Covid-19 crisis. “It is not. It is part of the system we have built. When you read the history of England, Italy, and the Middle East, you read of frequent quarantines and lockdowns because of sieges and plagues. These were built into the economic landscape and into the costs of every merchant. So the cost of the pandemic and future pandemics should be set against gross domestic product figures. We must realize our real economic growth is much lower than our annual figures suggest because the disasters wipe out the growth of preceding years.”
