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The new sage of Wall Street: author of The Black Swan
Edward Helmore, The Observer
On Friday afternoon, Nassim Nicholas Taleb could be found on the veranda of a hotel bar in Louisville, Kentucky, knocking back bourbon in the warm afternoon sunlight. No wonder the Lebanese-born trader turned author feels like relaxing: his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, has become a huge success. A book of economics and philosophy, it’s found a vast audience, speaks to its time and has become something of a key text to help understand the crisis in market capitalism.
Not only does the book sit high in the US bestseller lists, but as a mark of its impact, the term ‘black swan’ has joined ‘tipping point’ and ‘long tail’ by having a life of its own. The financial meltdown is now routinely referred to as a ‘black swan event’. As influential financial website bloomberg.com noted earlier this month: ‘One hears folks from New York to Ulaanbaatar buzzing about black swans.’
Taleb’s central thesis is that a small number of unexpected events – the black swans – explains much of import that goes on in the world. We need to understand just how much we will never understand is the line. ‘The world we live in,’ he likes to say, ‘is vastly different from the world we think we live in.’
(28 September 2008)
Reinventing Reality (or Collapse Sandwich) – Orlov and Pinchbeck (podcast)
KMO, C-Realm Podcast
Daniel Pinchbeck and Dmitry Orlov!
KMO welcomes Daniel Pinchbeck and Dmitry Orlov to the program to discuss their visions of the challenges and opportunities that present themselves in this liminal moment in human history. Might our economic system be on the verge of collapse? Would that necessarily be a bad thing? How might we reinvent ourselves and our society as we search for a new guiding communal myth? Later, KMO talks with Corey Call about the upcoming Coalessence Festival in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
(26 September 2008)
Portland Freedom Tribe 2010: from Palin to Paradise
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
Now the story can be told for whoever is out there to hear it. Perhaps it will help you to rebuild or create community wherever you are. We are curious if you went through a similar experience, because real news became unreliable and mostly pointless due to the struggle we had on our hands. What do you have in the way of material resources and arrangements to keep yourselves alive and rebuild society? Maybe we can help each other. We have sent this message through what’s left of the internet and as a dispatch by bicycle caravan and sail transport.
We vividly recall the last gasp of the U.S. economy beginning as financial collapse, soon bringing everyone’s usual activities to a screaming halt right after the election of 2008. Portland was picked for the first major military crackdown even before its rejection of the election of Sarah Palin as de facto President. Exit polls conflicting with official results helped trigger Portland’s declaration of fraud and the call for Jimmy Carter to convene a United Nations inquiry. But Portland then and there made its perhaps unintended break with the outside. Fortunately, trouble with oil supplies nationally made an occupation by federal troops unfeasible after it was attempted, and our townspeople engaged in Gandhian noncooperation.
This you probably knew. The following is the rest of the story when communications and travel took a nose dive. If you are far away in the former U.S. empire, you may have been given a different story. In any event, what interests us is what you created out of the upheaval and disaster.
Our unanticipated revolt surprised even us, starting with our public suspicion and outrage over the manipulation of the vote starting in October.
(28 September 2008)
