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Nassim Nicholas Taleb: There Is A Global Riot Against Pseudo Experts
Swarajya Staff
Jan 29, 2017, 11:42 AM | Updated 11:42 AM IST
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Leading Lebanese-American economist and mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb said in an interview that the emergence of populist movements around the world is sparking a global riot against pseudo-experts.
These leaders are majoritarian, they build on resentment, they use social media for direct access to their voters, and they can take radical decisions, said Taleb, who predicted the 2008 economic crisis, the Brexit vote, the US presidential election and other events correctly.
When asked, is the election of Trump a part of a global phenomena, and how does he draw similarity to the election of Narendra Modi in India, he said:
With Trump, Modi, Brexit, and now France, there are some similar problems in those countries. What you are hearing is people getting fed up with the ruling class. It has nothing to do with fascism. It has to do with the faux-experts problem and a world with too many experts. If we had a different elite, we may not see the same problem.
According to him, what Trump says shouldn’t worry anyone, and the intellectual class that is raising questions are a small minority of 200,000 people in the US and they don’t represent everyone upset with Trump. The real problem is that of the ‘faux-expert ’.
When questioned about why he said former US president Barack Obama put novocaine in the system and how will Donald Trump administration be able to address this, he said:
The whole mandate Trump got was because he understood the economic problems. People don’t realise that Obama created inequalities when he distorted the system. You can only get rich if you have assets. What Trump is doing is put some kind of business sense in the system.
On the flaws of globalisation, he said:
When you open up your small economies, you lose some of your ethnicity or diversity. Artisans are being killed by globalisation. Think of the effect on so many artists who have been put out of work while people are buying wrinkle-free shirts and cheap mobile phones. I’m a localist. The problem is globalisation comes through large global corporates that are predatory, and so we want to counter its ill-effects.
Taleb came down heavily on the US media, claiming he gets more credible news from social media than the main stream media. He, however, commended the Indian media, which he feels presents both sides of the story.
Read the full interview here.
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