Skin in the Game

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  *1 Ipsi testudines edite, qui cepistis.

  *2 Plenius aequo Iaudat venalis qui vult extrudere merces. —Horace

  *3 Even then, the Ottomans did not go far enough in granting autonomy. Some argue that had Armenians heeded the call by the novelist Raffi for additional autonomy, the tragedies of the 1890s and 1915 would have been mitigated.

  *4 The head of the Arab League, one Amr Moussa, was horrified at a lecture I gave outlining the notion that “good fences make better neighbors.” He was offended by my message “promoting sectarianism.” The common strategy by the Sunni-dominant majority in Arabic-speaking countries has been to call any attempt by a group to establish some autonomy “sectarianism” (ironically, these people, when rich, often have houses in Switzerland). It is always convenient to invoke universalism when you are in the majority. Since they are good at labels, they also accuse you of “racism” if, like the Kurds, Maronites, and Copts, you make any remote claim about self-rule. The term “racism” has undergone some devaluation, as it can be funny to observe Iraqis and Kurds calling one another racist for both wanting and opposing Kurdish self-determination.

  *5 “For he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.” (Shakespeare, Henry V)

  *6 Users of products are more reliable because of a natural filtering. I bought an electric car—a Tesla—because my neighbor was enthusiastic about his (skin in the game), and I watched him remain so for a few years. No amount of advertising will match the credibility of a genuine user.

  Why you don’t have to smoke in the smoking section—Your food choices on the fall of the Saudi king—How to prevent a friend from working too hard—Omar Sharif’s conversion—How to make a market collapse

  The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will almost never give us a clear indication of how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters are the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules.

  The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule, the mother of all asymmetries. It suffices for an intransigent minority—a certain type of intransigent minority—with significant skin in the game (or, better, soul in the game) to reach a minutely small level, say 3 or 4 percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer (who looks at the standard average) would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for this. (Fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work, and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though your grandmothers’ wisdom doesn’t.)

  Among other things, many other things, the minority rule will show us how all it takes is a small number of intolerant, virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.

  FIGURE 1. The lemonade container with the circled U indicating it is (literally) kosher.

  This example of complexity hit me, ironically, as I was helping with the New England Complex Systems Institute summer barbecue. As the hosts were setting up the table and unpacking the drinks, a friend who was observant and ate only kosher dropped by to say hello. I offered him a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade, almost certain that he would reject it owing to his dietary laws. He didn’t. He drank the liquid, and another kosher person commented, “Around here, drinks are kosher.” We looked at the carton container. There was a fine print: a tiny symbol, a U inside a circle, indicating that it was kosher. The symbol will be detected by those who need to know and look for the minuscule print. As for myself, like the character in Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme who suddenly discovers that he has been speaking in prose all these years without knowing it, I realized that I had been drinking kosher liquids without knowing it.

  CRIMINALS WITH PEANUT ALLERGIES

  A strange idea hit me. The kosher population represents less than three tenths of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are kosher. Why? Simply because going full kosher allows the producers, grocers, and restaurants to not have to distinguish between kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking sub-facilities. And the simple rule that changes the total is as follows:

  A kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food, but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.

  Or, rephrased in another domain:

  A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom, but a nondisabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.

  Granted, sometimes in practice we hesitate to use a bathroom with a disabled sign on it owing to some confusion—mistaking the rule for the one for parking cars, believing that the bathroom is reserved for exclusive use by the handicapped.

  Someone with a peanut allergy will not eat products that touch peanuts, but a person without such an allergy can eat items with peanut traces in them.

  Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on U.S. airplanes and why schools are often peanut-free (which, in a way, increases the number of persons with peanut allergies, as reduced exposure is one of the causes behind such allergies).

  Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:

  An honest person will never commit criminal acts, but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.

  Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And their relationship rests on an asymmetry in choices.

  I once pulled a prank on a friend. Years ago, when Big Tobacco was hiding and repressing the evidence of harm from secondary smoke, New York had smoking and nonsmoking sections in restaurants (even airplanes had, absurdly, a smoking section). I once went to lunch with a fellow visiting from Europe: the restaurant only had availability in the smoking section. I convinced my visitor that we needed to buy cigarettes, as we had to smoke in the smoking section. He complied.

  Two more things. First, the geography of the terrain, that is, the spatial structure, matters a bit; it makes a big difference whether the intransigents are in their own district or are mixed with the rest of the population. If people following the minority rule lived in ghettos with a separate small economy, then the minority rule would not apply. But when a population has an even spatial distribution, say, when the ratio of such a minority in a neighborhood is the same as that in the entire village, that in the village it is the same as in the county, that in the county it is the same as in state, and that in the sate it is the same as nationwide, then the (flexible) majority will have to submit to the minority rule. Second, the cost structure matters quite a bit. It happens in our first example that making lemonade compliant with kosher laws doesn’t change the price by much—it is a matter of avoiding some standard additives. But if the manufacturing of kosher lemonade costs substantially more, then the rule will be weakened in some nonlinear proportion to the difference in costs. If it costs ten times as much to make kosher food, then the minority rule will not apply, except perhaps in some very rich neighborhoods.

  Muslims have kosher laws, so to speak, but these are much narrower and apply only to meat. Muslims and Jews have near-identical slaughter rules (all kosher is halal for most Sunni Muslims, or was so in past centuries, but the reverse is not true). Note that these slaughter rules are skin-in-the-game driven, inherited from the ancie
nt Eastern Mediterranean Greek and Levantine practice of economically burdensome animal sacrifice, to only worship the Gods if one has skin in the game. The Gods do not like cheap signaling.

  Now consider this manifestation of the dictatorship of the minority. In the United Kingdom, where the (practicing) Muslim population is only 3 to 4 percent, a very high proportion of the meat we find is halal. Close to 70 percent of lamb imports from New Zealand are halal. Close to 10 percent of Subway stores carry halal-only meat (meaning no pork), in spite of the high costs of losing the business of ham eaters (like myself). The same holds in South Africa, which has about the same proportion of Muslims. There, a disproportionately high share of chicken is halal certified. But in the U.K. and other nominally Christian countries, halal is not neutral enough to reach a high level, as people may rebel against being forced to abide by others’ sacred values—accepting and respecting the sacred values of other religions might signal some type of violation of yours, if you are a true monotheist. For instance, the seventh century Christian Arab poet Al-Akhtal made a point to never eat halal meat in his famous defiant poem boasting his Christianity: “I do not eat sacrificial flesh”: Wa lastu bi’akuli lahmal adahi.

  Al-Akhtal was reflecting a standard Christian reaction from three or four centuries earlier—Christians were tortured in pagan times by being forced to eat sacrificial meat, which they found sacrilegious. Many Christian martyrs took the heroic stance of starving to death rather than ingest impure food.

  One can expect the same rejection of others’ religious norms to take place in the West as the Muslim populations in Europe grow.

  So the minority rule may produce a larger share of halal food in the stores than warranted by the proportion of halal eaters in the population, but with a headwind somewhere because some people may have a taboo against the custom. But with some non-religious kashrut rules, so to speak, the share can be expected to converge closer to a 100 percent (or some high number). In the U.S. and Europe, “organic” food companies are selling more and more products precisely because of the minority rule, and because ordinary and unlabeled food may be seen by some to contain pesticides, herbicides, and transgenic genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, with, according to them, unknown risks. (What we call GMOs in this context means transgenic food, entailing the transfer of genes from a foreign organism or species that would not have occurred in nature). Or it could be for some existential reasons, cautious behavior, or Burkean conservatism (that is, following the precautionary ideas of Edmund Burke)—some may not want to venture too far too fast from what their grandparents ate. Labeling something “organic” is a way to say that it contains no transgenic GMOs.

  In promoting genetically modified food via all manner of lobbying, purchasing of congressmen, and overt scientific propaganda (with smear campaigns against such persons as yours truly, much about which later), big agricultural companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots. Your snap “scientific” judgment is too naive for these types of decisions. Consider that transgenic-GMO eaters will eat non-GMOs, but not the reverse. So it may suffice to have a tiny percentage—say, no more than 5 percent—of an evenly spatially distributed population of non-genetically modified eaters for the entire population to have to eat non-GMO food. How? Say you have a corporate event, a wedding, or a lavish party to celebrate the fall of the Saudi Arabian regime, the bankruptcy of the rent-seeking investment bank Goldman Sachs, or the public reviling of Ray Kotcher, chairman of Ketchum the contemptible public relations firm, the enemy of scientists and scientific whistleblowers. Do you need to send a questionnaire asking people if they eat or don’t eat transgenic GMOs and reserve special meals accordingly? No. You just select everything non-GMO, provided the price difference is not consequential. And the price difference appears to be small enough to be negligible, as (perishable) food costs in America are largely, up to about 80 or 90 percent, determined by distribution and storage, not the cost at the agricultural level. And as organic food is in higher demand, thanks to the minority rule, distribution costs decrease and the minority rule ends up accelerating in its effect.

  “Big Ag” (the large agricultural firms) does not realize that this is the equivalent of entering a game in which one needed to not just win more points than the adversary, but win 97 percent of the total points just to be safe. It is strange to see an industry that spends hundreds of millions of dollars on research-cum-smear-campaigns, with hundreds of these scientists who think of themselves as more intelligent than the rest of us, miss such an elementary point about asymmetric choices.

  Another example: do not think that the spread of automatic shifting cars is necessarily due to a majority preference; it could just be because those who can drive manual shifts can always drive automatic, but the reverse is not true.

  The method of analysis employed here is called a “renormalization group,” a powerful apparatus in mathematical physics that allows us to see how things scale up (or down). Let us examine it next—without mathematics.

  FIGURE 2. Renormalization group, steps one through three (start from the top): Four boxes containing four boxes, with one of the boxes dark at step one, with successive applications of the minority rule.

  RENORMALIZATION GROUP

  Figure 2 shows four boxes exhibiting what is called fractal self-similarity. Each box contains four smaller boxes. Each one of the four boxes will contain four boxes, and so all the way down, and all the way up until we reach a certain level. There are two shades: light for the majority choice, and dark for the minority one.

  Assume the smaller unit contains four people, a family of four. One of them is in the intransigent minority and eats only non-GMO food (which includes organic). The color of this box is dark, and the others light. We “renormalize once” as we move up: the stubborn daughter manages to impose her rule on the four and the unit is now all dark, i.e., will opt for non-GMO. Now, step three, you have the family going to a barbecue party attended by three other families. As they are known to only eat non-GMO, the guests will cook only organic. The local grocery store, realizing the neighborhood is only non-GMO, switches to non-GMO to simplify life, which impacts the local wholesaler, and the system continues to “renormalize.”

  By some coincidence, the day before the Boston barbecue, I was flaneuring in New York, and I dropped by the office of Raphael Douady, a friend I wanted to prevent from working, that is, engaging in an activity that, when abused, causes the loss of mental clarity, in addition to bad posture and loss of definition in facial features. The French physicist Serge Galam happened to be visiting, and chose the friend’s office to kill time and taste Raphael’s bad espresso. Galam was first to apply these renormalization techniques to social matters and political science; his name was familiar, as he is the author of the main book on the subject, which had then been sitting for months in an unopened Amazon box in my basement. He elaborated on his research and showed me a computer model of elections by which it suffices for some minority to exceed a certain level for its choices to prevail.

  So the same illusion exists in political discussions, spread by political “scientists”: you think that because some extreme right- or left-wing party has, say, the support of ten percent of the population, their candidate will get ten percent of the votes. No: these baseline voters should be classified as “inflexible” and will always vote for their faction. But some of the flexible voters can also vote for that extreme faction, just as non-kosher people can eat kosher. These people are the ones to watch out for, as they may swell the number of votes for the extreme party. Galam’s models produced a bevy of counterintuitive effects in political science—and his predictions have turned out to be way closer to real outcomes than the naive consensus.

  THE VETO

  What we saw in the renormalization group was the “veto” effect, as a person in a group can steer choices. The advertising exe
cutive (and extremely bon vivant) Rory Sutherland suggested to me that this explains why some fast-food chains, such as McDonald’s, thrive. It’s not because they offer a great product, but because they are not vetoed in a certain socio-economic group—and by a small proportion of people in that group at that.*1

  When there are few choices, McDonald’s appears to be a safe bet. It is also a safe bet in shady places with few regulars where the food variance from expectation can be consequential—I am writing these lines in the Milan train station and, as offensive as it can be to someone who spent all this money to go to Italy, McDonald’s is one of the few restaurants there. And it is packed. Shockingly, Italians are seeking refuge there from a risky meal. They may hate McDonald’s, but they certainly hate uncertainty even more.

  Pizza is the same story: it is a commonly accepted food, and, outside a gathering of pseudo-leftist caviar eaters, nobody will be blamed for ordering it.

  Rory wrote to me about the beer-wine asymmetry and the choices made for parties: “Once you have 10 percent or more women at a party, you cannot serve only beer. But most men will drink wine. So you only need one set of glasses if you serve only wine—the universal donor, to use the language of blood groups.”

  This strategy of seeking the optimal among not necessarily great options might have been played by the Khazars when they were looking to choose between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Legend has it that three high-ranking delegations (bishops, rabbis, and sheikhs) came to make the sales pitch. The Khazar lords asked the Christians: if you were forced to chose between Judaism and Islam, which one would you pick? Judaism, they replied. Then the lords asked the Muslims: which of the two, Christianity or Judaism? Judaism, the Muslims said. Judaism it was; and the tribe converted.