这系列为塔勒布的精选文章（不一定和金融强相关），这些文章好的地方在于拓展和延伸了黑天鹅三部曲中不同议题在历史/现实中的应用和理解方式。
塔勒布的文章深度远非一般译者可以翻译，因为他的文章要求译者本身具备过硬的统计/数学/金融/地理/语言/艺术等相关学识。（华人世界有不少翻译把skin in the game翻译成所谓的切肤之痛，个人觉得？？？？这完全词不达意吧）
近期反正风声鹤唳草木皆兵，不如沉淀下来发发干货。
令：对现在经济局势/交易策略有需求的请加入星球。
上文：塔勒布文集：如何真正支配你的敌人
The Static and the Dynamic — How to go bankrupt and be loved by the many –Piketty’s equals
论静态与动态
如何破产后仍旧被众人爱戴
皮凯蒂（著名经济学家和作者）口中的所谓平等
Inequality vs Inequality
There is inequality and inequality.
The first is the inequality people tolerate, such as one’s understanding compared to that of people deemed heroes, say Einstein, Michelangelo, or the recluse mathematician Grisha Perelman, in comparison to whom one has no difficulty acknowledging a large surplus. This applies to entrepreneurs, artists, soldiers, heroes, the singer Bob Dylan, Socrates, the current local celebrity chef, some Roman Emperor of good repute, say Marcus Aurelius; in short those for whom one can naturally be a “fan”. You may like to imitate them, you may aspire to be like them; but you don’t resent them.
The second is the inequality people find intolerable because the subject appears to be just a person like you, except that he has been playing the system, and getting himself into rent seeking, acquiring privileges that are not warranted –and although he has something you would not mind having (which may include his Russian girlfriend), he is exactly the type of whom you cannot possibly become a fan. The latter category includes bankers, bureaucrats who get rich, former senators shilling for the evil firm Monsanto, clean-shaven chief executives who wear ties, and talking heads on television making outsized bonuses. You don’t just envy them; you take umbrage at their fame, and the sight of their expensive or even semi-expensive car trigger some feeling of bitterness. They make you feel smaller.
第一是人们可以容忍的不平等，比如一个人的理解力与那些被视为英雄的人相比，比如爱因斯坦、米开朗基罗，或者隐居数学家格里沙·佩雷尔曼，与这些人相比，一个人很容易承认自己有很大的过剩。这适用于企业家、艺术家、士兵、英雄、歌手鲍勃·迪伦、苏格拉底、当地现任名厨、一些享有盛誉的罗马皇帝，比如马可·奥勒留；简而言之，那些人们可以自然而然成为“粉丝”的人。你可能喜欢模仿他们，你可能渴望像他们一样；但你不会怨恨他们。
第二是人们无法容忍的不平等，因为主体看起来只是一个水平和你差不多的人，区别在于他一直在玩弄体制，让自己得以获得寻租空间，并获得不应有的特权——尽管他有一些你不介意的东西（可能包括他的俄罗斯女友），但他正是那种你不可能成为粉丝的人。
后一类人包括银行家、发了财的官僚、为邪恶的孟山都公司做广告的前参议员、打着领带、胡子刮得很干净的首席执行官，以及在电视上赚着巨额奖金的名嘴。你不只是羡慕他们；你对他们的名气感到愤慨，看到他们那辆昂贵甚至半昂贵的汽车，你会感到有些苦涩。他们让你觉得自己很渺小。
There may be something dissonant in the spectacle of a rich slave.
The author Joan Williams, in an insightful article, explains that the working class is impressed by the rich, as role models. Michèle Lamont, the author of The Dignity of Working Men, whom she cites, did a systematic interview of blue collar Americans and found present a resentment of professionals but, unexpectedly, not of the rich.
It is safe to accept that the American public –actually all public –despise people who make a lot of money on a salary, or, rather, salarymen who make a lot of money. This is indeed noticeable in other countries: a few years ago one third of the Swiss, of all people, voted in favor of a law capping salaries of managers. But the same Swiss hold rich entrepreneurs, and people who have derived their celebrity by other means, in some respect.[ii]
Further, in countries where wealth comes from rent seeking, political patronage, or what is called regulatory capture (by which the powerful uses regulation to scam the public, or red tape to slow down competition), wealth is seen as zero-sum. What Peter gets is extracted from Paul. Someone getting rich is doing so at other people’s expense. In countries such as the U.S. where wealth can come from destruction, people can easily see that someone getting rich is not taking dollars from your pocket; perhaps even putting some in yours. On the other hand, inequality, by definition, is zero sum.
作者琼·威廉姆斯在一篇富有洞察力的文章中解释说，工人阶级对富人印象深刻，视并他们为榜样。她引用了《工人的尊严》一书的作者米歇尔·拉蒙特对美国蓝领工人进行了系统采访，发现他们对专业人士怀有怨恨，但出乎意料的是，他们对富人却没有怨恨。
可以肯定的是，美国公众——实际上是所有公众——都鄙视那些靠薪水赚很多钱的人，或者更确切地说，鄙视那些赚很多钱的工薪族。这在其他国家确实很明显：几年前，三分之一的瑞士人投票支持一项限制管理人员工资的法律。但在某些方面，瑞士也有富有的企业家和通过其他方式获得名气的人。[ii]
此外，在财富来自寻租、政治赞助或所谓的监管俘获（即当权者利用监管来欺骗公众，或利用官僚作风来减缓竞争）的国家，财富被视为零和博弈。彼得得到的是从保罗那里榨取的。有人致富是以牺牲他人为代价的。在美国等财富可能来自破坏的国家，人们很容易看出，致富的人不是从你的口袋里拿钱，甚至可能把一些钱放进你的口袋。另一方面，不平等，从定义上讲，是零和博弈。
In this chapter I will propose that effectively what people resent –or should resent –is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting the income or wealth bracket, and getting to the soup kitchen. Again, on that account, the detractors of Donald Trump, when he was a candidate, failed to realize that, by advertising his episode of bankruptcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, they removed the resentment (the second type of inequality) one may have towards him. There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money.
In addition, someone without skin in the game –say a corporate executive with upside and no financial downside (the type to speak clearly in meetings) –is paid according to some metrics that do not necessarily reflect the health of the company; these (as we saw in Chapter x) he can manipulate, hide risks, get the bonus, then retire (or go to another company) and blame his successor for the subsequent results.
We will also, in the process, redefine inequality and put the notion on more rigorous grounds. But we first need to introduce the difference between two types of approaches, the static and the dynamic, as skin in the game can transform one type of inequality into another.
此外，与自己没有利益关系的人——比如说，一个有上升空间而没有财务下降空间的公司高管（在会议上说话清楚的那种人）——的薪酬是根据一些不一定反映公司健康状况的指标支付的；他可以操纵这些（正如我们在第十章中看到的），隐藏风险，获得奖金，然后退休（或去另一家公司），并将后续结果归咎于他的继任者。
在此过程中，我们还将重新定义不平等，并将这一概念置于更严格的基础上。但我们首先需要介绍两种方法之间的区别，即静态方法和动态方法，因为参与可以将一种不平等转变为另一种不平等。
Take also the two following remarks:
True equality is equality in probability
and
Skin in the game prevents systems from rotting
The Static and the Dynamic
Visibly, a problem with economists (particularly those who never really worked in the real world) is that they have mental difficulties with things that move and are unable to consider that things that move have different attributes from things that don’t –it may be trivial but reread Chapter [3] on IYIs if you are not convinced. That’s the reason complexity theory and fat tails are foreign to most of them; they also have (severe) difficulties with the mathematical and conceptual intuitions required for deeper probability theory. Blindness to ergodicity which we will define a few paragraphs down, is indeed in my opinion the best marker separating a genuine scholar who understands something about the world, from an academic hack who partakes of a ritualistic paper writing.
让我们思考以下两种论述：
真正的平等是概率上的平等
和
风险共担可防止系统内部腐烂和崩溃
（社会财富流动）静态和动态
显然，经济学家（尤其是那些从未真正在现实世界中工作过的经济学家）的一个问题是，他们对移动的事物存在心理障碍，无法考虑移动的事物与不移动的事物具有不同的属性——这可能微不足道，但如果您不相信，请重读第 [3] 章关于 IYI。这就是复杂性理论和肥尾对他们中的大多数人来说陌生的原因；他们还（严重）难以掌握更深层次的概率论所需的数学和概念直觉。对遍历性的盲目性（我们将在下面几段中定义）在我看来确实是区分真正了解世界的学者和参与仪式化论文写作的学术庸才的最佳标志。
Let us make a few definitions:
Static inequality is a snapshot view of inequality; it does not reflect what will happen to you in the course of your life
Consider that about ten percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top one percent and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top ten percent[1]. This is visibly not the same for the more static –but nominally more equal –Europe. For instance, only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than sixty percent of those on the French list were heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are really even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries.[iii]
Dynamic (ergodic) inequality takes into account the entire future and past life
You do not create dynamic equality just by raising the level of those at the bottom, but rather by making the rich rotate –or by forcing people to incur the possibility of creating an opening.
首先静态不平等是不平等的快速截图；实际该截图并不反映你一生中会发生什么。
想想看，大约 10% 的美国人将在最富有的 1% 中度过至少一年，而超过一半的美国人将在最富有的10% 中度过一年[1]。对于更静态但名义上更平等的欧洲来说，这显然是不一样的。
例如，三十年前，美国最富有的 500 人或王朝中只有10% 是这样的；法国名单上超过 60% 的人是继承人，三分之一的欧洲最富有的人是几个世纪前最富有的人。在佛罗伦萨，事情实际上更糟糕：同样的少数家族掌握了五个世纪的财富。[iii]
再者动态（遍历）不平等考虑到了整个未来和过去的生活
你不能仅仅通过提高底层人民的水平来创造动态平等，而是通过让富人轮换——或者通过强迫人们承担创造机会的可能性。
The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the one percent
Or, more mathematically
Dynamic equality assumes Markov chain with no absorbing states
Our condition here is stronger than mere income mobility. Mobility means that someone can become rich. The no absorbing barrier condition means that someone who is rich should never be certain to stay rich.
Now, even more mathematically
Dynamic equality is what restores ergodicity, making time and ensemble probabilities substitutable
Let me explain ergodicity –something that we said is foreign to the intelligentsia; we will devote an entire section as we will see it cancels most crucial psychological experiments related to probability and rationality. Take a cross sectional picture of the U.S. population. You have, say, a minority of millionaires in the one percent, some overweight, some tall, some humorous. You also have a high majority of people in the lower middle class, school yoga instructors, baking experts, gardening consultants, spreadsheet theoreticians, dancing advisors, and piano repairpersons. Take the percentages of each income or wealth bracket (note that income inequality is flatter than that of wealth). Perfect ergodicity means that each one of us, should he live forever, would spend the proportion of time in the economic conditions of segments of that entire cross-section: out of, say, a century, an average of sixty years in the lower middle class, ten years in the upper middle class, twenty years in the blue collar class, and perhaps one single year in the one percent. (Technical comment: what we can call here imperfect ergodicity means that each one of us has long term, ergodic probabilities that have some variation among individuals: your probability of ending in the one percent may be higher than mine; nevertheless no state will have a probability of zero for me and no state will have a transition probability of one for you).
The exact opposite of perfect ergodicity is an absorbing state. The term absorption is derived from particles that, when they hit an obstacle, get absorbed or stick to it. An absorbing barrier is like a trap, once in, you can’t get out, good or bad. A person gets rich by some process, then having arrived, as they say, he stays rich. And if someone enters the lower middle class (from above); he will never have the chance to exit from it and become rich should he want to, of course –hence will be justified to resent the rich. You will notice that where the state is large, people at the top tend to have little downward mobility –in such places as France, the state is chummy with large corporations and protects their executives and shareholders from experiencing such descent; it even encourages their ascent.
让社会更加平等的方法是（通过参与其中）迫使富人承担退出 1% 的风险
或者，从数学角度来说
动态平等假设马尔可夫链没有吸收状态
我们这里的条件比单纯的收入流动性更强。流动性意味着某人可以致富。没有吸收障碍条件意味着富人永远不能确定自己会一直富有。
现在，从数学角度来说
社会财富流动的动态平等就是恢复遍历性，使时间和集合概率可替代
让我来解释遍历性——这个概念是当今知识分子不了解的东西；我们将用整整一节来解释，因为我们将看到它取消了与概率和理性相关的大多数关键心理实验。
如果我们对美国人口进行横断面分析。比如说，1%的总人口中有少数百万富翁，有些人超重，有些人高大，有些人幽默。你还发现，下层中产阶级、学校瑜伽教练、烘焙专家、园艺顾问、电子表格理论家、舞蹈顾问和钢琴修理工占了绝大多数。取每个收入或财富等级的百分比（请注意，收入不平等比财富不平等更平坦）。
完全遍历性意味着，我们每个人，如果他永远活着，都会在整个横截面的各个部分的经济状况中度过一定比例的时间：比如说，一个世纪中，平均 60年生活在下层中产阶级，10年生活在上层中产阶级，20年生活在蓝领阶层，也许只有一年生活在1%（的财富区间）。（从技术角度延伸：我们在这里可以称之为不完全遍历性，这意味着我们每个人都有长期的、遍历的概率，这些概率在个体之间会有所不同：你最终进入1%的概率可能高于我；然而，对我来说，没有一个状态的概率为零，对你来说，没有一个状态的转换概率为 1）。
完美遍历性的对立面是吸收状态。吸收这个术语源于粒子，当它们碰到障碍物时，会被吸收或粘附在障碍物上。吸收屏障就像一个陷阱，一旦进去，就无法出来，不管是好是坏。
一个人通过某种方式致富，然后，正如人们所说，他一到那里，就一直富有。如果有人进入中下阶层（从上层），他永远没有机会离开这个阶层，当然，如果他想的话，他也不可能致富——因此，有理由怨恨富人。你会注意到，在大国经济尤为如此，除非极端情况，否则上层人士往往很少有向下的流动性——在法国这样的地方，国家与大公司关系密切，保护他们的高管和股东免于经历这种财富阶层下滑；甚至鼓励他们向上爬。
And no downside for some means no upside for the rest.
Take for now that an absorbing state –staying rich –causes path dependence, the topic of Part X.
Pikketism and the Revolt of the Mandarin Class
There is a class often called the Mandarins, after the fictional memoirs of the French author Simone de Beauvoir, named after the scholars of the Ming dynasty that gave their name to the high Chinese language. I have always been aware of its existence, but its salient –and pernicious –attribute came to me while observing the reactions to the works by the French economist Thomas Pikkety.
Pikkety followed Karl Marx by writing an ambitious book on Capital. I received the book as a gift when it was still in French (and unknown outside France) because I found it commendable that people publish their original, nonmathematical work in social science in book format. The book, Capital in the 21st Century, made aggressive claims about the alarming rise of inequality, added to a theory of why capital tended to command too much return in relation to labor and how absence of redistribution and dispossession would make the world collapse. The theory about the increase in the return of capital in relation to labor was patently wrong, as anyone who has witnessed the rise of what is called the “knowledge economy” (or anyone who has had investments in general) knows. But there was something far, far more severe than a scholar being wrong.
皮克提主义和官僚阶层的反抗
有一个阶层通常被称为官僚阶层，以法国作家西蒙娜·德·波伏娃的虚构回忆录命名，以明朝的学者命名，他们给高级汉语起了名字。我一直都知道它的存在，但它的显著——和有害——属性是在我观察法国经济学家托马斯·皮克提作品的反应时才浮现出来的。
皮克提继卡尔·马克思之后写了一本雄心勃勃的《资本论》一书。当这本书还是法文版时（法国以外地区无人知晓），我收到了这本书作为礼物，因为我发现人们以书籍形式出版他们原创的非数学社会科学著作是值得称赞的。《21 世纪资本论》一书对令人担忧的不平等现象的加剧提出了强烈主张，并补充了资本为何倾向于获得相对于劳动力而言过高的回报以及缺乏再分配和剥夺将导致世界崩溃的理论。资本回报率相对于劳动力增加的理论显然是错误的，任何见证过所谓“知识经济”崛起的人（或任何进行过一般投资的人）都知道这一点。但还有比学者犯错更严重的事情。
Soon, I discovered that the methods he used were flawed: Picketty’s tools did not show what he purported about the rise in inequality. I soon wrote two articles, one in collaboration with Raphael Douady that we published in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Applications, about the measure of inequality that consists in taking the ownership of, say the top 1% and monitoring its variations. The flaw is that if you take the inequality thus measured in Europe as a whole, you will find it is higher than the average inequality across component countries; the bias increases in severity with extreme processes. The same defect applied to the way inequality researchers used a measure called Gini coefficient, and I wrote another paper on that. All in all, the papers had enough theorems and proofs, to make them about as ironclad a piece of work one can have in science; I insisted on putting the results in theorem form because someone cannot contest a formally proved theorem without putting in question his own understanding of mathematics.
The reason these errors were not known was because economists who worked with inequality were not familiar with… inequality. Inequality is the disproportion of the role of the tail –rich people were in the tails of the distribution.[2] The more inequality in the system, the more the winner-take-all effect, the more we depart from the methods of tin-tailed Mediocristan in which economists were trained. Recall that the wealth process is dominated by winner-take-all effects, the type described in The Black Swan. Any form of control of the wealth process –typically instigated by bureaucrats –tended to lock people with privileges in their state of entitlement. So the solution was to allow the system to destroy the strong, something that worked best in the United States.
The problem is never the problem; it is how people handle it. What was worse than the Piketty flaws was the discovery of how that Mandarin class operates. They got so excited by the rise of inequality that their actions were like fake news. Economists got so excited they praised Piketty for his “erudition” from his discussing Balzac and Jane Austen, the equivalent to hailing as a weightlifter someone seen carrying a briefcase. And they completely ignored my results –and when they didn’t, it was to declare that I was “arrogant” (recall that the strategy of using theorems is that they can’t say I was wrong, so they resorted to “arrogant” which is a form of scientific compliment). Even Paul Krugman who had written “if you think you’ve found an obvious hole, empirical or logical, in Piketty, you’re very probably wrong. He’s done his homework!”[iv], when I pointed out the flaw to him, when I met him in person, evaded it –not necessarily by meanness but most likely because probability and combinatorics eluded him, by his own admission.
Now consider that the likes of Krugman and Piketty have no downside in their existence –lowering inequality brings them up in the ladder of life. Unless the university system or the French state go bust, they will continue receiving their paycheck. Donald Trump is exposed to the risk of ending having his meals in a soup kitchen; not them.
很快，我发现他使用的方法存在缺陷：皮克蒂的工具并没有显示出他所声称的不平等加剧现象。我很快写了两篇文章，其中一篇与拉斐尔·杜阿迪合作发表在《物理A：统计力学与应用》上，内容是关于不平等的衡量标准，即掌握最富有的1%的人的所有权并监测其变化。
缺陷在于，如果你以欧洲整体为单位来衡量不平等，你会发现它高于各成员国之间的平均不平等；极端过程的偏差会加剧。不平等研究人员使用一种称为基尼系数的衡量标准的方式也存在同样的缺陷，我为此写了另一篇论文。总而言之，这些论文有足够多的定理和证明，使它们成为科学界最牢固的成果；我坚持将结果以定理形式呈现，因为人们无法质疑一个正式证明的定理，除非质疑自己对数学的理解。
这些错误之所以不为人所知，是因为研究不平等问题的经济学家并不熟悉……不平等。不平等是指尾部作用的不均衡——富人处于分配的尾部。[2] 系统中的不平等程度越高，赢家通吃效应就越强，我们就越偏离经济学家所接受的平庸斯坦方法。回想一下，财富过程受“黑天鹅”中描述的赢家通吃效应主导。任何形式的财富过程控制——通常由官僚煽动——都倾向于将拥有特权的人锁定在他们的应得状态中。因此，解决方案是让系统摧毁强者，这在美国最有效。
问题永远不是问题本身；而是人们如何处理它。比皮克提缺陷更糟糕的是发现那个官僚阶层是如何运作的。他们对不平等的加剧感到如此兴奋，以至于他们的行为就像假新闻一样。经济学家们激动不已，他们称赞皮凯蒂在讨论巴尔扎克和简·奥斯汀时“博学多识”，就好比称赞一个手提公文包的人是举重运动员。他们完全无视我的研究结果，当他们没有无视时，他们宣称我“傲慢”（回想一下，使用定理的策略是他们不能说我错了，所以他们诉诸“傲慢”，这是一种科学的赞美）。甚至保罗·克鲁格曼也曾写道：“如果你认为你在皮凯蒂身上发现了一个明显的漏洞，无论是经验上的还是逻辑上的，你很可能错了。他做足了功课！”[iv]，当我亲自见到他时，向他指出了这个缺陷，他回避了——不一定是出于卑鄙，但很可能是因为他自己承认，他不懂概率和组合学。
现在想想克鲁格曼和皮凯蒂这样的人，他们的存在没有任何负面影响——降低不平等程度让他们的生活水平上升。除非大学系统或法国政府破产，否则他们将继续领薪水。唐纳德·特朗普面临着在救济站吃饭的风险，而不是他们。
Cobbler Envies Cobbler
Envy does not travel long distance, or across so many social classes. The envy-driven feelings that usually –as we saw in the works of Williams and Lamont –do not originate from the impoverished classes, concerned with the betterment of their condition, but with that of the clerical class. Simply, it looks like it is the university professors (who have arrived) and people who have permanent stability of income, in the form of tenure, governmental or academic, who bought heavily in the argument. From the conversations, I became convinced that these people who counterfactual upwards (i.e. compare themselves to those richer) wanted to actively dispossess the rich. As will all communist movements, it is often the bourgeois or clerical classes that buy first into the argument.[1]
Aristotle, in his Rhetoric postulated that envy is something you are more likely to encounter in your own kin: lower classes are more likely to experience envy towards their cousins or the middle class than towards the very rich. The expression Nobody is a prophet in his own land making envy a geographical thing (mistakenly thought to originate with Jesus, ουδείς προφήτης στον τόπο του in Luke and a similar expression in Mark) originates with that passage in the Rhetoric. Aristotle himself was building on Hesiod’s: cobbler envies cobbler, carpenter envies carpenter. Later, La Bruyere wrote jealousy is found within the same art, talent and condition.
So I doubt Piketty bothered to ask blue-collar Frenchmen what they want, as Lamont did. I am certain that they would ask for a new dishwasher, or faster train for their commute, not to bring down some rich businessman invisible to them. But, again, people can frame questions and portray enrichment as theft, as it was before the French Revolution, in which case the blue-collar class would ask, once again, for heads to roll.[2]
[1] “τὸ συγγενὲς γὰρ καὶ φθονεῖν ἐπίσταται.”, Rhetoric 1388a, citing originally from Aeschylus, frag. 304.
[2] La Bruyere: L’émulation et la jalousie ne se rencontrent guère que dans les personnes du même art, de même talent et de même condition.
鞋匠嫉妒鞋匠（相互竞争）
嫉妒不会传播很远，也不会跨越那么多社会阶层。通常，正如我们在威廉姆斯和拉蒙特的作品中看到的那样，嫉妒驱动的情感并非源自贫困阶层，他们关心改善自己的状况，而是源自教士阶层。简单地说，看起来是大学教授（已经到达）和拥有永久稳定收入的人，以政府或学术职位的形式，对这一论点深信不疑。从谈话中，我确信，这些反事实向上的人（即将自己与富人进行比较）想要积极剥夺富人的财产。与所有共产主义运动一样，通常是资产阶级或教士阶层首先接受这一论点。[1]
亚里士多德在他的《修辞学》中假设，嫉妒是你更有可能在自己的亲属中遇到的东西：下层阶级更有可能对他们的表亲或中产阶级产生嫉妒，而不是对非常富有的人。表达“没有人能在自己的土地上成为先知”使嫉妒成为一种地理现象（人们错误地认为它起源于耶稣，在路加福音中是“嫉妒”，在马可福音中也有类似的表达）源于《修辞学》中的那段话。亚里士多德本人是在赫西俄德的基础上发展起来的：鞋匠嫉妒鞋匠，木匠嫉妒木匠。后来，拉布鲁耶尔写道，嫉妒存在于同一种艺术、才能和条件中。
所以我怀疑皮凯蒂会像拉蒙特那样费心去问法国蓝领工人他们想要什么。我敢肯定他们会要求一台新的洗碗机，或者更快的通勤列车，而不是打倒他们看不见的富商。但是，人们可以再次提出问题，并将财富描述为盗窃，就像法国大革命之前一样，在这种情况下，蓝领阶级会再次要求头脑清醒。[2]
[1] “τὸ συγγενὲς γὰρ καὶ φθονεῖν ἐπίσταται.”，修辞学 1388a，最初引自埃斯库罗斯，frag。304.
[2] La Bruyere: L’émulation et la jalousie ne se rencontrent guère que dans les personnes du même art, de même Talent et de même condition.
Data, Shmata
Another lesson from Piketty’s ambitious volume: it was loaded with charts and tables. But what we learn from professionals in the real world is that data is not necessarily rigor. One reason I –as a probability professional –left data out of The Black Swan (except for illustrative purposes) is that it seems to me that people flood their story with numbers and graphs in the absence of logical argument. Further, people mistake empiricism with flood of data. Just a little bit of significant data is needed when one is right, particularly when it is disconfirmatory empiricism, or counterexamples for rules: only one point is sufficient to show that Black Swans exist.
Probability, statistics, and data science are principally logic fed by observations –and absence of observations. For many environments, the relevant data points are those in the extremes; these are rare by definition; and it suffices to focus on those few but big to get an idea of the story. If you want to show that a person is richer than, say $10 million, all you need is show the $50 mil in his brokerage account, not, in addition, list every piece of furniture in his house, including the $500 painting he has in his study and a count of the silver spoons in his pantry. So I’ve discovered, with experience, that when you buy a thick book with tons of graphs and tables used to prove a point, something is alarmingly suspicious. It means something didn’t distil right! But for the general public and those untrained in statistics, such tables appear convincing –another way to substitute the true with the complicated. For instance, the science journalist Steven Pinker did that with his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, concerning the decline of violence in modern human history. My collaborator Pasquale Cirillo and I, when we put his “data” under scrutiny, found out that that either he didn’t understand his own numbers (actually, he didn’t), or he had a story in mind and kept adding charts not realizing that statistics isn’t about data but distillation, rigor and avoiding being fooled by randomness –but no matter, the general public of IYI colleagues found it impressive for a while.
数据，Shmata（数据抹布）
皮凯蒂雄心勃勃的著作还有另一个教训：它充满了图表和表格。但我们从现实世界的专业人士那里学到的是，数据不一定是严谨的。我——作为一名概率专业人士——在《黑天鹅》中没有提到数据（除了说明目的）的一个原因是，在我看来，人们在缺乏逻辑论证的情况下，用数字和图表充斥他们的故事。此外，人们把经验主义误认为是数据洪流。当一个人是正确的时候，只需要一点重要的数据，特别是当它是非证实性经验主义或规则的反例时：只要一个点就足以表明黑天鹅的存在。
概率、统计和数据科学主要是由观察和缺乏观察所形成的逻辑。对于许多环境，相关数据点是那些极端的数据点；从定义上讲，这些数据点很少见；只需关注那些少数但很大的数据点，就可以了解故事的大概情况。
如果你想证明某人比1000万美元更富有，你只需要展示他经纪账户中的 5000万美元，而不是另外列出他家里的每一件家具，包括他书房里价值 500美元的画作和他食品柜里的银勺数量。
所以我根据经验发现，当你买一本厚厚的书，里面有大量的图表和表格来证明一个观点时，有些事情是令人震惊的可疑的。这意味着有些事情没有得到正确的提炼！但对于普通大众和那些没有受过统计学训练的人来说，这样的表格似乎很有说服力——另一种用复杂的东西代替真实的东西。例如，科学记者史蒂芬·平克在他的《人性中的善良天使》一书中就是这样做的，这本书讲述了现代人类历史上暴力的减少。我和我的合作伙伴 Pasquale Cirillo 在仔细审查他的“数据”时发现，要么他不理解自己的数字（事实上，他并不理解），要么他脑子里有一个故事，并不断添加图表，没有意识到统计不是关于数据，而是提炼、严谨和避免被随机性所愚弄——但不管怎样，IYI 的广大同事一时间都对此印象深刻。
Ethics of Civil Service
People who like bureaucracies and the state have trouble understanding that having rich people in a public office is very different from having public people become rich –again it is the dynamics, the sequence that matters. Rich people in public office have shown some evidence of lack of total incompetence –success may come from randomness, of course, but we at least have a hint of some skill in the real world, some evidence that the person has dealt with reality. This is of course conditional of the person having had skin in the game –and it is better if the person felt a blowup, has experienced at least once the loss part of his or her fortune and the angst associated with it.
A good rule for society is to oblige those who start in public office to pledge never subsequently to earn from the private sector more than a set amount; the rest should go to the taxpayer. This will ensure sincerity in, literally, “service” — where employees are supposedly underpaid because of their emotional reward from serving society. It would prove that they are not in the public sector as an investment strategy: you do not become a Jesuit priest because it may help you get hired by Goldman Sachs later, after your eventual defrocking –given the erudition and the masterly control of casuistry generally associated with the Society of Jesus.
Currently, most civil servants tend to stay in civil service –except for those in delicate areas that industry controls: the agro-alimentary segment, finance, aerospace, anything related to Saudi Arabia…
Currently, a civil servant can make rules that are friendly to an industry such as banking — and then go off to J.P. Morgan and recoup a multiple of the difference between his or her current salary and the market rate. (Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)
So there is an implicit bribe in civil service: you act as a servant to industry, say Monsanto, and they take care of you later on. They do not do it out of a sense of honor: simply, it is necessary to keep such a system going and encourage the next guy to play by the rules. The IYI cum scumbag Tim Geithner–with whom I share a Calabrese barber –was overtly rewarded by the industry he helped bail out.
Watch former heads of state such as Bill Clinton or Tony Blair use the fame that the general public gave them to make hundreds of million in speaking fees –indeed for these two sleek fellows, public service was the most effective step towards enrichment. The difference between a salesman and a charlatan is that the latter doesn’t deliver what he claims to be selling. Ironically the pair Clinton-Blair appeared less greedy than the typical ego-driven businessman who seeks elections.
喜欢官僚机构和国家的人很难理解，富人担任公职与公众人物致富是截然不同的——同样重要的是动态和顺序。担任公职的富人已经表现出一些缺乏完全无能的证据——当然，成功可能来自随机性，但我们至少可以发现一些现实世界中的技能，一些证据表明这个人已经处理过现实。这当然是以这个人参与其中为前提的——如果这个人感到崩溃，至少经历过一次失去部分财富和与之相关的焦虑，那就更好了。
社会的一个好规则是要求那些刚担任公职的人承诺以后从私营部门赚的钱永远不超过一定数额；其余的应该归纳税人。这将确保“服务”的真诚——员工的薪水据说是低的，因为他们为社会服务而获得了情感回报。这表明他们进入公共部门不是为了投资：你不会成为一名耶稣会牧师，因为这可能会帮助你在最终被免职后被高盛聘用——鉴于耶稣会通常具有的博学和对诡辩的精湛控制。
目前，大多数公务员倾向于继续留在公务员队伍中——除了那些在工业控制的敏感领域：农业食品部门、金融、航空航天、任何与沙特阿拉伯有关的领域……
目前，公务员可以制定对银行等行业友好的规则——然后去摩根大通收回其当前工资与市场价格之间差额的数倍。（你可能还记得，监管者有动机制定尽可能复杂的规则，以便他们的专业知识以后能以更高的价格被聘用。）
因此，公务员队伍中存在一种隐性贿赂：你充当工业的仆人，比如孟山都，他们以后会照顾你。他们这样做并非出于荣誉感：只是，有必要让这样的系统继续运行，并鼓励下一个人遵守规则。IYI 兼卑鄙小人蒂姆·盖特纳——我和他共用一个卡拉布雷西亚理发师——从他帮助拯救的行业获得了明显的回报。
看看比尔·克林顿或托尼·布莱尔等前国家元首如何利用公众给予他们的名声赚取数亿美元的演讲费——事实上，对于这两个圆滑的人来说，公共服务是致富的最有效途径。推销员和骗子之间的区别在于，后者不会提供他声称要推销的东西。具有讽刺意味的是，克林顿-布莱尔这对搭档看起来不像典型的追求选举的自我驱动的商人那样贪婪。
[CONTINUED LATER. THIS IS EXCERPTED FROM SKIN IN THE GAME]
[1] 39% of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 % of the income distribution, 56 % will find themselves in the top 10%, and 73% percent will spend a year in the top 20 %.
[2] The type of distributions –called fat tails –associated with it made the analyses more delicate, far more delicate and it had become my mathematical specialty. In Mediocristan changes over time are the result of the collective contributions of the center, the middle. In Extremistan these changes come from the tails. Sorry, if you don’t like it but that is purely mathematical.
[2] 与之相关的分布类型（称为肥尾）使分析更加精细，精细得多，这已成为我的数学专长。在平均斯坦，随着时间的推移，变化是中心、中间的集体贡献的结果。在极端斯坦，这些变化来自尾部。抱歉，如果你不喜欢它，但这是纯粹的数学。
[ii] HBR article by Joan williams https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class
[iii] Ref http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/from-rags-to-riches-to-rags.html?_r=0
[iv] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/piketty-and-pareto/
