What is a "brown swan"?
Tuesday January 6, 2009
Categories: Culture
Filed Under: brown swan, Steve Sailer
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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I think he does slightly misunderstand Taleb on Wall Street, but it is a useful coinage. There is no claiming that the current crisis is a black swan - far too many people predicted it.
Sharon
Yeah, I don't know if Sailer misunderstands Taleb, or if he's just pointing out that people are abusing Taleb's concept. Having read The Black Swan, it's pretty clear to me (and I think should be to anyone) that what happened on Wall Street was NOT a Black Swan -- the results of their behaviors were pretty predictable even to the layperson who had a modicum of sense. But I think that's Sailer's point -- I read the book and paid attention to its concept (as well as I could grasp it), I didn't just pick it up and go, "Cool! Theory that validates me!" and then read it in light of that search for validation.
Call me less-than-whelmed: I see a scarcely-disguised ethnic slur achieved by calling the West and the Sunbelt "rapidly Hispanicizing regions," thus creating the impression that all (or at least most) of these toxic mortgages were issued to Latinos and, thus, Latinos and the Gringos who were solicitous of them are responsible for the meltdown.
This is of course a variant on the CRA/Acorn theory of the economic crisis with Brown people in the role previously played by Black folks. It was crap in its original version, it's crap in this one.
"The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the text."
I do like this quote. It makes sense of what happened to Adam Smith (the real one.)
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