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To Save Lives, We Need More Conflicts. And a Strong Economy Needs More Failure.
To Save Lives, We Need More Conflicts. And a Strong Economy Needs More Failure.
How could more conflicts be a good thing?
Well, imagine 50 wars among city-states that each kill 30,000. That is a staggering 1.5 million deaths.
Or one war among nation-states, say World War II, which killed an estimated 60 million people.
Call me crazy, but I’ll take more conflicts if it means fewer deaths overall.
And according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile, smaller governments resembling city-states produce overall more peaceful results for society. Even when there are more conflicts, they claim fewer total lives than years of buildup to explosive large wars.
Or consider that the Soviet Union post-World War II was relatively peaceful towards other nation-states… while Stalin murdered millions and millions of Soviet citizens.
“Stalin could not have existed in a municipality.”
Small is beautiful in so many other ways. Take for now that the small–in the aggregate that is, a collection of small units–is more antifragile than the large.
This means that the overall group is more likely to survive if it is made up of smaller units. And the units which survive will be better for withstanding the tests.
Even in the Soviet Union, this proved true. For instance, under centralized control, Stalin stole the food of the entire nation of Ukraine, orchestrating a famine which starved somewhere around 6 million people.
But most of the Soviet Union did not starve, because food production remained relatively decentralized. Each village produced much of the food it needed, so they were less affected by the horribly inefficient food distribution of the Soviet centralized state. And cities which did not produce their own food fared much worse.
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Antifragile Food Systems
Antifragile Food Systems
‘The alpha person at a gathering of “high status” persons is usually the waiter.’
In the film, No Escape, Owen Wilson and Lake Bell’s characters play a stereotypical USAnian couple, Jack and Annie Dwyer, cast abroad like fishes out of water. He is a corporate engineer in charge of putting a water plant into a fictional Southeast Asian country. She is the dutiful wife, bringing along to the temporary assignment two young children and their favorite kitchen appliances.
When civil war suddenly erupts before they have even gotten past jet-lag and they find themselves in an urban killing field, hunted by machete-wielding guerillas who are really angry about the way Jack’s corporation has stolen and monetized their water rights, they must run for their lives, which they do for the next hour or more of screen time.
That’s the plot, but the film is less about why the couple got into their predicament or why this small country has decided to murder all its foreign tourists than how Jack and Annie and their children absorb the changed circumstances, adapt to their precarious situation, and do what it takes to survive. Theater audiences are rooting for them, despite their complete lack of preparation.
In Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb distinguishes antifragile from words like robust or resilient by saying that when something is antifragile, it benefits when things go bad. Taleb is a recovering Wall Street quant trader. He understands hedges and shorts, and indeed, wrote the textbook on dynamic hedging in 1997. His subsequent books, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001) and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) redefined at how traders look at risk and how people should think about risk in life choices.
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