Why the Aggregate Hates the Individual

Why the Aggregate Hates the Individual

Antifragility in biology works across layers. This rivalry between suborganisms contributes to evolution: cells within our bodies compete; within the cells, proteins compete, all the way through. Let us translate the point into human endeavors. The economy has an equivalent layering: individuals, artisans, small firms, departments within corporations, corporations, industries, the regional economy, and, finally, on top, the general economy—one can even have thinner slicing with a larger number of layers.

For the economy to be antifragile and undergo what is called evolution, every single individual business must necessarily be fragile, exposed to breaking—evolution needs organisms (or their genes) to die when supplanted by others, in order to achieve improvement, or to avoid reproduction when they are not as fit as someone else. Accordingly, the antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one. Every time you use a coffeemaker for your morning cappuccino, you are benefiting from the fragility of the coffeemaking entrepreneur who failed. He failed in order to help put the superior merchandise on your kitchen counter.

Also consider traditional societies. There, too, we have a similar layering: individuals, immediate families, extended families, tribes, people using the same dialects, ethnicities, groups.

While sacrifice as a modus is obvious in the case of ant colonies, I am certain that individual businessmen are not overly interested in hara-kiri for the greater good of the economy; they are therefore necessarily concerned in seeking antifragility or at least some level of robustness for themselves. That’s not necessarily compatible with the interest of the collective—that is, the economy. So there is a problem in which the property of the sum (the aggregate) varies from that of each one of the parts—in fact, it wants harm to the parts.

It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.

Now what is the solution? There is none, alas, that can please everyone—but there are ways to mitigate the harm to the very weak.

The problem is graver than you think. People go to business school to learn how to do well while ensuring their survival—but what the economy, as a collective, wants them to do is to not survive, rather to take a lot, a lot of imprudent risks themselves and be blinded by the odds. Their respective industries improve from failure to failure. Natural and naturelike systems want some overconfidence on the part of individual economic agents, i.e., the overestimation of their chances of success and underestimation of the risks of failure in their businesses, provided their failure does not impact others. In other words, they want local, but not global, overconfidence.

Consider Taleb’s example of the restaurant business: it is wonderfully efficient precisely because restaurants, being vulnerable, go bankrupt every minute, and entrepreneurs ignore such a possibility, as they think that they will beat the odds. In other words, some class of rash, even suicidal, risk taking is healthy for the economy—under the condition that not all people take the same risks and that these risks remain small and localized.

By disrupting this model with bailouts, governments typically favor a certain class of firms that are large enough to require being saved in order to avoid contagion to other business. This is the opposite of healthy risk-taking; it is transferring fragility from the collective to the unfit. People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody’s fall can drag others down—for continuous failures work to preserve the system. Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.