Skin in the Game

The author of The Black Swan is back with a simple warning: don't buy what your neighbour is selling unless he owns some too. The obvious application for this is investing, but Taleb has a much broader domain. In a kind of philosophical Freakonomics, he takes us from 5th-century wandering monks (banned by the church because they were too free) to Donald Trump (his imperfections showed he had skin in the game) -- Rosamund Urwin * Sunday Times Books of the Year * As always with Taleb, this is a fascinating set of ideas. And he's right. People with skin in the game learn how the game works. Without it, they don't -- William Leith * Evening Standard * The most prophetic voice of all . . . Taleb is a genuinely significant philosopher . . . someone who is able to change the way we view the structure of the world through the strength, originality and veracity of his ideas alone -- John Gray * GQ * Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the Richard Wagner of uncertainty. While the Ring Cycle of the German composer/librettist portrayed the struggle of the gods in a series of operas, the Incerto series of books by the Lebanese-American author is devoted to humans -- specifically how we deal with the endemic risk in our all-too-finite existence -- Dominic Lawson * Sunday Times *