Skin in the Game

Former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that bearing the risks of one's own decisions is necessary for fairness, efficient commerce and sound risk management, and for understanding the world at all. His target is asymmetry: people who take rewards while shifting risks onto others, as he says bankers and large corporations do, or war hawks who never face the dangers of the wars they urge. He ranges from Seneca and Hammurabi to Donald Trump and Antaeus the Giant, argues that stubborn minorities rather than majorities set the rules, and gives a chapter to the Intellectual Yet Idiot. Part of his Incerto series alongside The Black Swan and Antifragile, it became a New York Times best seller.

Daniel Kahneman endorsed it as having changed his view of how the world works, and Marc Andreessen paired it with Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment as a guide to whom to listen to and why. James Altucher said the title alone is worth it.