Book in the news: Stop talking and start acting

Book review: Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily LifeNassim Nicholas Taleb's latest offering explores why you should only listen to those with skin in the game.

Dr Matthew Partridge
By
published
in Features

886-skin-100

Published by Allen Lane, £20

Buy at Amazon

It's safe to stay that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has cornered the market in books about risk. His last four books including The Black Swan, which rather niftily anticipated the financial crisis have all examined aspects of the topic. His latest "advances his long-held belief that people should only be heeded or trusted if they have a personal stake in the outcome", says John Gapper in the Financial Times. Conversely, the advice of everyone else "should be ignored, or treated with a great deal of scepticism, because they lack both credibility and integrity".

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"The argument of the new book is attractive", admits The Guardian's Zoe Williams, and the author's "fearlessness, self-belief and immodesty adds up to charisma on the page". That said, "Taleb is the festival messiah you'd follow into a river until the drugs wore off".

The argument is too broad Taleb's animus against bureaucrats, for example, "is hard to sustain; if you accept that systems are complex, then subsidiarity devolving decisions down to the lowest civic level at which they can be made, where everyone's skin is involved can only be a partial solution".

A weakness with this book unlike his others is that "it is short on practicality", agrees Matthew Syed in The Times. "Does Taleb really think that prime ministers and presidents should fight alongside the troops they send into battle?" Yet overall this is a powerfully argued book, in which "Taleb makes the moral case for acting rather than merely talking". On that front, he certainly has good suggestions for dealing with those who offer advice on investing: "Don't tell me what you think. Just tell me what is in your portfolio".

Dr Matthew Partridge
Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri

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