I think we all know what it means to have “skin in the game”… to have incurred risk (monetary or otherwise) as the result of being involved (directly or indirectly) in a venture.
Skin in the Game (February 2018) is also the title of Lebanese- American scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s No. 1 New York Times bestseller.
Nassim is not new to the bestseller list as his 2007 book The Black Swan–which has sold over 3 million copies to date–was described, in a review by The Sunday Times, as one of the 12 most influential books since World War II. Nassim also serves as co-editor-in-chief for a rather fitting academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis.
In Skin in the Game, considered to be Nassim’s most provocative and practical published work yet, “he sets out to redefine what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others.”
While I certainly would not align with all of Nassim’s assessments, his claim, “A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point,” is an assertion to which I wholeheartedly do agree.
Herein lies the problem, however – for those of us who are well aware we have a pound or more of flesh in the game when it comes to decisions made by local governing officials— much of the information we, the public, are “let in on” is limited or is presented as half-truths; in other words, we are not getting all the facts, just enough to placate in hopes of moving the momentum forward.
We are left to interpret words intended to dissuade taxpayers.
There continues to be a definite mismatch between reality and statistics. We are confronted with endless refutations of clear logic – reckless at times and subject to grandiose overstatements intended to simply “popularize” ideas— which will ultimately lead people to have the wrong map of reality.
How misleading, incomplete—and often incorrect—the information has a tendency to be.
Not divulging all relevant information, including significant facts–and even those small unknown variations in the data—can have a huge impact, resulting in flawed assumptions… masking incompetence with a veneer of technical sophistication.
We have witnessed transparency and fiduciary obligations conveniently disregarded by officials. It’s not enough to hold public hearings if all the facts don’t show up.
Professor Nassim suggests officials “should have to pay some kind of penalty for decisions that negatively impact others— risk sharing vs. risk transfer—is a solid framework for thinking about a host of issues.”
In late 2015 Nassim, along with Robert J. Frey and Raphael Douady—a couple of mathematical wizards— formed the Real World Risk Institute to build the principles and methodology for what they termed “realworld rigor,” in decision-making.
Nassim argues that knowledge and technology are usually generated by what he calls “stochastic tinkering” (speculative, suspect or disputable) rather than by top-down directed research.
Unfortunately, it’s become too easy for local leadership to become so self-consumed and arrogant that they are more interested in portraying themselves as the brightest minds in existence than in presenting a coherent concept of how our intellect can select reason from the chaos that has become “normative” in our ever-present state of existence here in Cook County.
I’ll wrap this week’s column up by suggesting, placing trust in the process is less important than being able to trust those who control the process.
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics.
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