Maths? I breakfasted on quadratic equations, but it was a waste of timeChampioning a difficult discipline of no use merely panders to the political correctness of the conservative classes
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Simon Jenkins The Guardian, Friday June 6 2008 Article historyYou don't have to be innumerate to be a mathematician, but it could help. Elders of the tribe have produced a report for the thinktank Reform which calculates that Britain has "lost half a million" mathematicians since 1990 at a cost to the economy of a "staggering £9bn". Needless to say, the government should act.
How £9bn? The boffins have added up the average "market premium" of the 430,000 fewer A-level maths students who have ceased studying the subject over the period and declared that total "lost" to the national product. This is irrespective of what the bright sparks might otherwise have earned, or whether a flooding of the market with mathematicians might have depressed the so-called premium.
Even if the maths is robust, the economics is dreadful. It looks as if the authors thought of a figure big enough to win some headlines and get the excitable Tory schools spokesman, Michael Gove, to demand that the government do something. Both succeeded.
My campaign for curricular updating is getting nowhere. Were the Reform report not devoted to the Holy Mother Church of maths and science, some mathematician would have dismissed it as nonsense. But nonsense in the service of professional self-aggrandisement is what ethicists call "good cause corruption". Maths and science self-justify as economically worthwhile in a way that law or economics or management studies do not dare. They must fight their corner in the marketplace.
Championing the report in these pages on Tuesday, the Oxford maths professor, Marcus du Sautoy, claimed that examiners were now too frantic to make maths seem relevant to young people's working lives. The subject had been "emasculated by a move away from rigour and logic" in pursuit of the fool's gold of "relevance". This had "ended up just making it boring".
I studied advanced maths to 16. I loved wandering in its virtual world of trigonometry and logarithms, primes and surds. I breakfasted on quadratic equations, lunched on differential calculus and strolled, arm in arm, with Ronald Searle's square on the hypotenuse.
It was a waste of time. I dedicated my next two years to Latin and Greek, which proved to be more useful (just). Most teenagers clearly feel the same. They must grapple with difficult techniques and concepts which hardly any of them will ever use, assuming they can understand or remember them.
In the age of computers, maths beyond simple and applied arithmetic is needed only by specialists. Ramming it down pupils' throats in case they may one day need it is like making us all know how to recalibrate a carburettor on the offchance that we might become racing drivers. Maths is a "skill to a purpose", and we would should ponder the purpose before overselling the skill.
An academic subject in decline always grasps at one last straw, that it "trains the mind". In his essay on Arnold of Rugby, Lytton Strachey pointed out that this argument kept Victorian education immured in the middle ages, teaching classical languages while Germany and America were forging ahead with technology. Why irrelevance to life should hold the key to mental callisthenics is never explained, let alone proved. It is on a par with such maxims as "The shortest route to a boy's brain is through the seat of his pants". The old guard say that a dose of algebra and Latin verbs "never did me any harm", but the modern student is rightly more demanding.
When Kenneth Baker invented the national curriculum in 1987, it never occurred to him to question its content. Science and maths lobbied hard and captured the core, alongside only English. Not just history and geography, but economics, health, psychology, citizenship, politics and law - with far better claims to vocational utility - were elbowed aside. Millions of pounds were and still are devoted to teaching maths to reluctant pupils who know that they will never see or hear of it again. Numbers studying maths and science since 1987 have plummeted. Baker's attempt at centralist compulsion was a failure.
The claim that "Britain needs maths" is shaky. In the 60s and 70s, half of Europe's output of mathematicians and scientists was from the Soviet Union. There was a huge "maths premium", but no impact on national prosperity. The Soviets forgot to teach economics, let alone politics, law or the liberal arts. I could as well reply to Reform that more maths at the expense of humanities would spell economic disaster.
In the two decades during which British pupils have fled from maths towards social science and the humanities, the economy has boomed. It has done so on the strength of finance, marketing and design, on service activities that have little mathematical content. If the market is any guide, Britain "needs" more financiers, consultants, marketers, publicists and lawyers. Besides, maths as a discipline is now global rather than chauvinistic. Maths research is online; the HeyMath! website is a universal teacher.
The two best books on this topic are Innumeracy, by the American John Allen Paulos, and A Mathematician's Apology, by former Cambridge professor GH Hardy. The first describes all the maths a person needs to know, mostly simple concepts applied to daily life, to proportion, risk and probability. Paulos makes the point that a nation may be expert at algebra yet have no sense of statistical probability, to the profit of its insurance industry and the detriment of its public life.
To Hardy, maths was a sublimely cerebral activity. "The mathematics that can be used for ordinary purposes by ordinary men is negligible," he wrote. The glory of maths was aesthetic, "justified as art if it can be justified at all". The practitioner is pursuing "a harmless and innocent occupation", an intellectual hobby. What stimulates today's students is the realm of the creative imagination and the working of the marketplace. This spectrum, from English and drama to business and finance, seems benign both to individuals and to the economy. Students are not stupid. They know where money is to be made, which is why they flock to medicine among the sciences.
Maths replies that these young people are just taking easy options. But there is no virtue in a difficult discipline whose victims regard it as of no use. Students are declining to specialise in maths not because it is difficult but because they cannot see the point.
Curricular archaism is the political correctness of the conservative classes. To pass muster, a subject must help the economy or, if not, be deliberately irrelevant, a mind trainer. It must have a long academic tradition. It must be obscure. Above all, it must not be novel or popular with students.
Yet there is no reason why a new subject cannot be made challenging. That is the job of education. Besides, young people are voting with their feet. They want the humanities and social sciences that are clamouring for a place on the curriculum, and they will get them. The old guard must make way.
“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer. "My 80% friend isn't my 20% enemy" Ronald Reagan.
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Friday 6 June 2008
Thursday 5 June 2008
The Mortgage
For his birthday a little boy asked for a 10-speed bike.'Son, we'd give you one,' the father said,'but the mortgage on this house is $280,000,
and your mother just lost her job. There's no way we
can afford it in our current situation.'The next day the father saw the little boy heading out the front
door with a suitcase. So he asked, 'Son, where are
you going? ''Well,' the boy said, 'I was walking past
your room last night and heard you telling mom aloud that you
were pulling out. Then I heard mom scream asking youto wait because she was coming too. And I'll be damned if
I'm staying here by myself with a $280,000 mortgage and no bike!'
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Wednesday 4 June 2008
The right time for women
The right time for women to quit smoking
When it comes to giving up smoking, pick the start date carefully. At certain times in your menstrual cycle, you are twice as likely to succeed at kicking the habit. And the same applies to starting a diet, finding a new boyfriend or going for a job interview
Leah Hardy
In fact, giving up smoking is far from the only thing affected by the menstrual cycle — the ebb and flow of hormones have a powerful impact on nearly all aspects of your life. So, make the time of the month work for you.
The best time to give up drink and drugs Scientists have discovered powerful links between cravings and hormones. Recently, researchers at the University of Minnesota found that women who gave up smoking in the follicular part of their cycle (from the start of their period until ovulation on about day 14) were half as likely to remain smoke-free as those who gave up in the luteal phase (after ovulation, but before the start of the next period). Only two in 10 of the women who gave up in the earlier phase managed to abstain; however, in the second group, four in 10 were successful. Why? It seems the high levels of progesterone found in the luteal phase can help to move nicotine out of the system more quickly, thus reducing withdrawal symptoms. Studies also show women are more easily tempted to smoke by seeing other people smoking when oestrogen levels are high, as in the follicular phase.
Don’t be tempted to experiment with drugs such as cocaine in the first half of your cycle, either. Large amounts of oestrogen also boost levels of the pleasure hormone dopamine and reduce the amount of mucus in your nose, ensuring you will get more of a hit from the drug, thus increasing the risk of addiction. And if you want to stay sober, the hormone allopregnanolone is your friend. This also peaks in the phase before ovulation, and high doses reduce your desire to drink.
The best time to hit the gym Want to show off your stretchy yoga moves in class? Shift your mat to the front just before your period, as this is when you are most flexible. A hormone called relaxin peaks at this time, softening your ligaments. But don’t go mad — that extra flexibility may result in injury. A study at the Portland Hospital in London found that women were at the greatest risk of damaging their ligaments at the end of their cycle, but were also in danger of pulling muscles and ligaments halfway through the cycle, as levels of the strength-giving hormone oestrogen drop suddenly after ovulation.
For aerobic exercise, pick days 15-22, when rising progesterone will make working out feel easier, and you will burn up to 30% more fat, according to a study published in Australasian Science magazine. If you prefer a weights-based workout, do it in the first half of your cycle, as high oestrogen levels will make you stronger. And if you want to run a marathon, the best days are just before ovulation (days 9-12) and just after (days 17-20).
The best time to meet a man Looking for romance? Then schedule your social life for the week around ovulation, when you will not only appear more attractive to men, but, if you lay off the deodorant, even smell irresistible. A study published in the journal Ethology asked men to sniff the armpit odour of women at different stages of their cycle. The result? The armpit odour of women who were between the end of their period and ovulation — when they are most fertile — was considered the most attractive and least intense.
This surge in attractiveness is matched by a leap in libido around day 13, when rocketing oestrogen and testosterone make a woman feel, dress and even walk (yes, really) more sexily, as nature conspires to make you pregnant. However, a study at the University of St Andrews says the surge in attractiveness around ovulation is masked in women who wear too much make-up. So, the moral is, get out there, but leave the slap and antiperspirant alone.
The best time to have a painful experience Putting off going to the dentist because of the painful needle? Dreading booking that Brazilian wax? Then schedule both for bang in the middle of your cycle. At ovulation, you have a higher pain threshold than at other times, due to the large amounts of oestrogen in your system.
If your idea of agony is applying for a new job, then try to avoid an interview in the days before your period if you don’t want to seem nervous or flustered. According to Dr Ann Rasmusson, a neuroendocrinologist at Yale University in America, this is when you are most likely to be affected by stress. “Levels of progesterone and other related neurosteroids drop dramatically at this time,” she says.
The best time to start a diet According to a team of South African researchers, your food intake can vary by a staggering 2,500 calories a day, depending on your hormones levels. And when it comes to starting a diet, scientists suggest you will be less hungry when your period begins. A study by researchers at Tufts University, Massachusetts, indicates that women eat 12% less per day at the start of their cycle because their levels of oestrogen are lower.
After ovulation, your appetite is naturally boosted by hormones, so if you do happen to be pregnant, you will want to eat enough for two. However, your metabolism and urge to exercise are higher after ovulation, too, so by heading to the gym, you might be able to work off those extra calories.
In a paper published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, researchers say, perhaps unsurprisingly, that women tend to experience cravings for sugary and high-carbohydrate foods just before their period, and they also have the most trouble controlling their hunger at this time.
The scientists agree that starting a diet after day one of your period could be helpful, and also suggest increasing calorie intake by about 100-200 calories when you are premenstrual, so you don’t get so desperate that you find yourself on the phone to Pizza Hut. Their suggestion for how to consume those extra calories? Best-quality dark chocolate. These are the kind of scientists we like.
Understanding your cycle
The average woman’s natural menstrual cycle takes about 28 days, though this can vary by about five days either way. Menstruation normally starts about 14 days after ovulation. The cycle is divided into phases. The first day of a period is day one, and the start of the follicular phase, when an egg starts to ripen in the ovaries. The next stage is ovulation (about day 14), when the egg is released to be fertilised (or not). After ovulation comes the luteal phase, which lasts until the start of the next period.
Straight after a period, levels of the hormones oestrogen and progesterone are relatively low. Oestrogen levels rise to a peak at ovulation, then drop. Progesterone levels rise after ovulation and peak halfway through the luteal phase (about day 21), then fall dramatically just before the start of menstruation.
When it comes to giving up smoking, pick the start date carefully. At certain times in your menstrual cycle, you are twice as likely to succeed at kicking the habit. And the same applies to starting a diet, finding a new boyfriend or going for a job interview
Leah Hardy
In fact, giving up smoking is far from the only thing affected by the menstrual cycle — the ebb and flow of hormones have a powerful impact on nearly all aspects of your life. So, make the time of the month work for you.
The best time to give up drink and drugs Scientists have discovered powerful links between cravings and hormones. Recently, researchers at the University of Minnesota found that women who gave up smoking in the follicular part of their cycle (from the start of their period until ovulation on about day 14) were half as likely to remain smoke-free as those who gave up in the luteal phase (after ovulation, but before the start of the next period). Only two in 10 of the women who gave up in the earlier phase managed to abstain; however, in the second group, four in 10 were successful. Why? It seems the high levels of progesterone found in the luteal phase can help to move nicotine out of the system more quickly, thus reducing withdrawal symptoms. Studies also show women are more easily tempted to smoke by seeing other people smoking when oestrogen levels are high, as in the follicular phase.
Don’t be tempted to experiment with drugs such as cocaine in the first half of your cycle, either. Large amounts of oestrogen also boost levels of the pleasure hormone dopamine and reduce the amount of mucus in your nose, ensuring you will get more of a hit from the drug, thus increasing the risk of addiction. And if you want to stay sober, the hormone allopregnanolone is your friend. This also peaks in the phase before ovulation, and high doses reduce your desire to drink.
The best time to hit the gym Want to show off your stretchy yoga moves in class? Shift your mat to the front just before your period, as this is when you are most flexible. A hormone called relaxin peaks at this time, softening your ligaments. But don’t go mad — that extra flexibility may result in injury. A study at the Portland Hospital in London found that women were at the greatest risk of damaging their ligaments at the end of their cycle, but were also in danger of pulling muscles and ligaments halfway through the cycle, as levels of the strength-giving hormone oestrogen drop suddenly after ovulation.
For aerobic exercise, pick days 15-22, when rising progesterone will make working out feel easier, and you will burn up to 30% more fat, according to a study published in Australasian Science magazine. If you prefer a weights-based workout, do it in the first half of your cycle, as high oestrogen levels will make you stronger. And if you want to run a marathon, the best days are just before ovulation (days 9-12) and just after (days 17-20).
The best time to meet a man Looking for romance? Then schedule your social life for the week around ovulation, when you will not only appear more attractive to men, but, if you lay off the deodorant, even smell irresistible. A study published in the journal Ethology asked men to sniff the armpit odour of women at different stages of their cycle. The result? The armpit odour of women who were between the end of their period and ovulation — when they are most fertile — was considered the most attractive and least intense.
This surge in attractiveness is matched by a leap in libido around day 13, when rocketing oestrogen and testosterone make a woman feel, dress and even walk (yes, really) more sexily, as nature conspires to make you pregnant. However, a study at the University of St Andrews says the surge in attractiveness around ovulation is masked in women who wear too much make-up. So, the moral is, get out there, but leave the slap and antiperspirant alone.
The best time to have a painful experience Putting off going to the dentist because of the painful needle? Dreading booking that Brazilian wax? Then schedule both for bang in the middle of your cycle. At ovulation, you have a higher pain threshold than at other times, due to the large amounts of oestrogen in your system.
If your idea of agony is applying for a new job, then try to avoid an interview in the days before your period if you don’t want to seem nervous or flustered. According to Dr Ann Rasmusson, a neuroendocrinologist at Yale University in America, this is when you are most likely to be affected by stress. “Levels of progesterone and other related neurosteroids drop dramatically at this time,” she says.
The best time to start a diet According to a team of South African researchers, your food intake can vary by a staggering 2,500 calories a day, depending on your hormones levels. And when it comes to starting a diet, scientists suggest you will be less hungry when your period begins. A study by researchers at Tufts University, Massachusetts, indicates that women eat 12% less per day at the start of their cycle because their levels of oestrogen are lower.
After ovulation, your appetite is naturally boosted by hormones, so if you do happen to be pregnant, you will want to eat enough for two. However, your metabolism and urge to exercise are higher after ovulation, too, so by heading to the gym, you might be able to work off those extra calories.
In a paper published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, researchers say, perhaps unsurprisingly, that women tend to experience cravings for sugary and high-carbohydrate foods just before their period, and they also have the most trouble controlling their hunger at this time.
The scientists agree that starting a diet after day one of your period could be helpful, and also suggest increasing calorie intake by about 100-200 calories when you are premenstrual, so you don’t get so desperate that you find yourself on the phone to Pizza Hut. Their suggestion for how to consume those extra calories? Best-quality dark chocolate. These are the kind of scientists we like.
Understanding your cycle
The average woman’s natural menstrual cycle takes about 28 days, though this can vary by about five days either way. Menstruation normally starts about 14 days after ovulation. The cycle is divided into phases. The first day of a period is day one, and the start of the follicular phase, when an egg starts to ripen in the ovaries. The next stage is ovulation (about day 14), when the egg is released to be fertilised (or not). After ovulation comes the luteal phase, which lasts until the start of the next period.
Straight after a period, levels of the hormones oestrogen and progesterone are relatively low. Oestrogen levels rise to a peak at ovulation, then drop. Progesterone levels rise after ovulation and peak halfway through the luteal phase (about day 21), then fall dramatically just before the start of menstruation.
Monday 2 June 2008
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom
Bryan Appleyard
Get Started!
A noisy cafe in Newport Beach, California. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is eating three successive salads, carefully picking out anything with a high carbohydrate content.
He is telling me how to live. "The only way you can say 'F*** you' to fate is by saying it's not going to affect how I live. So if somebody puts you to death, make sure you shave."
After lunch he takes me to Circuit City to buy two Olympus voice recorders, one for me and one for him. The one for him is to record his lectures – he charges about $60,000 for speaking engagements, so the $100 recorder is probably worth it. The one for me is because the day before he had drowned my Olympus with earl grey tea and, as he keeps saying, "I owe you." It didn't matter because I always use two recorders and, anyway, I had bought a replacement the next morning.
But it's important and it's not, strictly speaking, a cost to him. Every year he puts a few thousand dollars aside for contingencies – parking tickets, tea spills – and at the end of the year he gives what's left to charity. The money is gone from day one, so unexpected losses cause no pain. Now I have three Olympus recorders.
He spilt the tea – bear with me; this is important – while grabbing at his BlackBerry. He was agitated, reading every incoming e-mail, because the Indian consulate in New York had held on to his passport and he needed it to fly to Bermuda. People were being mobilised in New York and, for some reason, France, to get the passport.
The important thing is this: the lost passport and the spilt tea were black swans, bad birds that are always lurking, just out of sight, to catch you unawares and wreck your plans. Sometimes, however, they are good birds. The recorders cost $20 less than the marked price owing to a labelling screw-up at Circuit City. Stuff happens. The world is random, intrinsically unknowable. "You will never," he says, "be able to control randomness."
To explain: black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty.
"The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in."
Last May, Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It said, among many other things, that most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous. They live in a fantasy world in which the future can be controlled by sophisticated mathematical models and elaborate risk-management systems. Bankers and economists scorned and raged at Taleb. He didn't understand, they said. A few months later, the full global implications of the sub-prime-driven credit crunch became clear. The world banking system still teeters on the edge of meltdown. Taleb had been vindicated. "It was my greatest vindication. But to me that wasn't a black swan; it was a white swan. I knew it would happen and I said so. It was a black swan to Ben Bernanke [the chairman of the Federal Reserve]. I wouldn't use him to drive my car. These guys are dangerous. They're not qualified in their own field."
In December he lectured bankers at Société Générale, France's second biggest bank. He told them they were sitting on a mountain of risks – a menagerie of black swans. They didn't believe him. Six weeks later the rogue trader and black swan Jérôme Kerviel landed them with $7.2 billion of losses.
As a result, Taleb is now the hottest thinker in the world. He has a $4m advance on his next book. He gives about 30 presentations a year to bankers, economists, traders, even to Nasa, the US Fire Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. But he doesn't tell them what to do – he doesn't know. He just tells them how the world is. "I'm not a guru. I'm just describing a problem and saying, 'You deal with it.'"
Getting to know Taleb is a highly immersive experience. Everything matters. "Why are you not dressed Californian?" he asks at our first meeting. Everything in Newport Beach is very Californian. I'm wearing a jacket: it's cold. He's wearing shorts and a polo shirt. Clothes matter; they send signals. He warns against trusting anybody who wears a tie – "You have to ask, 'Why is he wearing a tie?'"
He has rules. In California he hires bikes, not cars. He doesn't usually carry his BlackBerry because he hates distraction and he really hates phone charges. But he does carry an Apple laptop everywhere and constantly uses it to illustrate complex points and seek out references. He says he answers every e-mail. He is sent thousands. He reads for 60 hours a week, but almost never a newspaper, and he never watches television.
"If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters."
But the biggest rule of all is his eccentric and punishing diet and exercise programme. He's been on it for three months and he's lost 20lb. He's following the thinking of Arthur De Vany, an economist – of the acceptable type – turned fitness guru. The theory is that we eat and exercise according to our evolved natures. Early man did not eat carbs, so they're out. He did not exercise regularly and he did not suffer long-term stress by having an annoying boss. Exercise must be irregular and ferocious – Taleb often does four hours in the gym or 360 press-ups and then nothing for 10 days. Jogging is useless; sprinting is good. He likes to knacker himself completely before a long flight. Stress should also be irregular and ferocious – early men did not have bad bosses, but they did occasionally run into lions.
He's always hungry. At both lunches he orders three salads, which he makes me share. Our conversation swings from high philosophy and low economics back to dietary matters like mangoes – bad – and apples – good as long as they are of an old variety. New ones are bred for sugar content. His regime works. He looks great – springy and fit. He shows me an old identity card. He is fat and middle-aged in the photo. He looks 10 years younger than that. "Look at me! That photo was taken seven years ago. No carbs!"
This is risk management – facing up to those aspects of randomness about which something can be done. Some years ago he narrowly survived throat cancer. The change in his voice was at first misdiagnosed as damaged vocal cords from his time on the trading floor. It can recur. Also he has a high familial risk of diabetes. He is convinced the diet of civilisation – full of carbs and sugar – is the problem. The grand doctors who once announced that complex carbohydrates are good for you are, to him, criminals responsible for thousands of deaths.
So, you are wondering, who is this guy? He was born in 1960 in Lebanon, though he casts doubt on both these "facts". The year is "close enough" – he doesn't like to give out his birth date because of identity theft and he doesn't believe in national character. He has, however, a regional identity; he calls himself a Levantine, a member of the indecipherably complex eastern Mediterranean civilisation. "My body and soul are Mediterranean."
Both maternal and paternal antecedents are grand, privileged and politically prominent. They are also Christian – Greek Orthodox. Startlingly, this great sceptic, this non-guru who believes in nothing, is still a practising Christian. He regards with some contempt the militant atheism movement led by Richard Dawkins.
"Scientists don't know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don't believe it has any negative impact on people's lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It's like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it's probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It's an aesthetic thing."
Take away religion, he says, and people start believing in nationalism, which has killed far more people. Religion is also a good way of handling uncertainty. It lowers blood pressure. He's convinced that religious people take fewer financial risks.
He was educated at a French school. Three traditions formed him: Greek Orthodox, French Catholic and Arab. They also taught him to disbelieve conventional wisdom. Each tradition had a different history of the crusades, utterly different. This led him to disbelieve historians almost as much as he does bankers.
But, crucially, he also learnt from a very early age that grown-ups have a dodgy grasp of probability. It was in the midst of the Lebanese civil war and, hiding from the guns and bombs, he heard adults repeatedly say the war would soon be over. It lasted 15 years. He became obsessed with probability and, after a degree in management from the Wharton business school at Pennsylvania University, he focused on probability for his PhD at the University of Paris.
For the non-mathematician, probability is an indecipherably complex field. But Taleb makes it easy by proving all the mathematics wrong. Let me introduce you to Brooklyn-born Fat Tony and academically inclined Dr John, two of Taleb's creations. You toss a coin 40 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of it coming up heads the 41st time? Dr John gives the answer drummed into the heads of every statistic student: 50/50. Fat Tony shakes his head and says the chances are no more than 1%. "You are either full of crap," he says, "or a pure sucker to buy that 50% business. The coin gotta be loaded."
The chances of a coin coming up heads 41 times are so small as to be effectively impossible in this universe. It is far, far more likely that somebody is cheating. Fat Tony wins. Dr John is the sucker. And the one thing that drives Taleb more than anything else is the determination not to be a sucker. Dr John is the economist or banker who thinks he can manage risk through mathematics. Fat Tony relies only on what happens in the real world.
In 1985, Taleb discovered how he could play Fat Tony in the markets. France, Germany, Japan, Britain and America signed an agreement to push down the value of the dollar. Taleb was working as an options trader at a French bank. He held options that had cost him almost nothing and that bet on the dollar's decline. Suddenly they were worth a fortune. He became obsessed with buying "out of the money" options. He had realised that when markets rise they tend to rise by small amounts, but when they fall – usually hit by a black swan – they fall a long way.
The big payoff came on October 19, 1987 – Black Monday. It was the biggest market drop in modern history. "That had vastly more influence on my thought than any other event in history."
It was a huge black swan – nobody had expected it, not even Taleb. But the point was, he was ready. He was sitting on a pile of out-of-the-money eurodollar options. So, while others were considering suicide, Taleb was sitting on profits of $35m to $40m. He had what he calls his "f***-off money", money that would allow him to walk away from any job and support him in his long-term desire to be a writer and philosopher.
He stayed on Wall Street until he got bored and moved to Chicago to become a trader in the pit, the open-outcry market run by the world's most sceptical people, all Fat Tonys. This he understood.
His first book, Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options, came out in 1997. He was moving away from being a pure trader, or "quant" – a quantitative analyst who applies sophisticated maths to investments – to being the philosopher he wanted to be. He was using the vast data pool provided by the markets and combining it with a sophisticated grasp of epistemology, the study of how and what we know, to form a synthesis unique in the modern world.
In the midst of this came his purest vindication prior to sub-prime. Long-Term Capital Management was a hedge fund set up in 1994 by, among others, Myron Scholes and Robert C Merton, joint winners of the 1997 Nobel prize in economics. It had the grandest of all possible credentials and used the most sophisticated academic theories of portfolio management. It went bust in 1998 and, because it had positions worth $1.25 trillion outstanding, it almost took the financial system down with it. Modern portfolio theory had not accounted for the black swan, the Russian financial crisis of that year. Taleb regards the Nobel prize in economics as a disgrace, a laughable endorsement of the worst kind of Dr John economics. Fat Tony should get the Nobel, but he's too smart. "People say to me, 'If economists are so incompetent, why do people listen to them?' I say, 'They don't listen, they're just teaching birds how to fly.' "
Taleb created his own hedge fund, Empirica, designed to help other hedge funds hedge their risks by using a refined form of his options wins – running small losses in quiet times and winning big in turbulent markets. It did okay but, after a good first year, performed poorly when the market went though a quiet spell. He's still involved in the markets, but mainly as a hobby – "like chess".
Finally, with two books – Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life, and The Black Swan – and a stream of academic papers, he turned himself into one of the giants of modern thought. They're still trying to tear him down, of course; last year The American Statistician journal devoted a whole issue to attacking The Black Swan. But I wouldn't bother. A bad but rather ignorant review in The New York Times resulted in such a savage rebuttal from Taleb on his website, www.fooledbyrandomness.com, that reviewers across the US pulled out in fear of his wrath. He knows his stuff and he keeps being right.
And what he knows does not sound good. The sub-prime crisis is not over and could get worse. Even if the US economy survives this one, it will remain a mountain of risk and delusion. "America is the greatest financial risk you can think of."
Its primary problem is that both banks and government are staffed by academic economists running their deluded models. Britain and Europe have better prospects because our economists tend to be more pragmatic, adapting to conditions rather than following models. But still we are dependent on American folly.
The central point is that we have created a world we don't understand. There's a place he calls Mediocristan. This was where early humans lived. Most events happened within a narrow range of probabilities – within the bell-curve distribution still taught to statistics students. But we don't live there any more. We live in Extremistan, where black swans proliferate, winners tend to take all and the rest get nothing – there's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and a lot of software writers living in a garage, there's Domingo and a thousand opera singers working in Starbucks. Our systems are complex but over-efficient. They have no redundancy, so a black swan strikes everybody at once. The banking system is the worst of all.
"Complex systems don't allow for slack and everybody protects that system. The banking system doesn't have that slack. In a normal ecology, banks go bankrupt every day. But in a complex system there is a tendency to cluster around powerful units. Every bank becomes the same bank so they can all go bust together."
He points out, chillingly, that banks make money from two sources. They take interest on our current accounts and charge us for services. This is easy, safe money. But they also take risks, big risks, with the whole panoply of loans, mortgages, derivatives and any other weird scam they can dream up. "Banks have never made a penny out of this, not a penny. They do well for a while and then lose it all in a big crash."
On top of that, Taleb has shown that increased economic concentration has raised our vulnerability to natural disasters. The Kobe earthquake of 1995 cost a lot more than the Tokyo earthquake of 1923. And there are countless other ways in which we have built a world ruled by black swans – some good but mostly bad. So what do we do as individuals and the world? In the case of the world, Taleb doesn't know. He doesn't make predictions, he insults people paid to do so by telling them to get another job. All forecasts about the oil price, for example, are always wrong, though people keep doing it. But he knows how the world will end.
"Governments and policy makers don't understand the world in which we live, so if somebody is going to destroy the world, it is the Bank of England saving Northern Rock. The biggest danger to human society comes from civil servants in an environment like this. In their attempt to control the ecology, they don't understand that the link between action and consequences can be more vicious. Civil servants say they need to make forecasts, but it's totally irresponsible to make people rely on you without telling them you're incompetent."
Bear Stearns – the US Northern Rock – was another vindication for Taleb. He's always said that whatever deal you do, you always end up dealing with J P Morgan. It was JPM that picked up Bear at a bargain-basement price. Banks should be more like New York restaurants. They come and go but the restaurant business as a whole survives and thrives and the food gets better. Banks fail but bankers still get millions in bonuses for applying their useless models. Restaurants tinker, they work by trial and error and watch real results in the real world. Taleb believes in tinkering – it was to be the title of his next book. Trial and error will save us from ourselves because they capture benign black swans. Look at the three big inventions of our time: lasers, computers and the internet. They were all produced by tinkering and none of them ended up doing what their inventors intended them to do. All were black swans. The big hope for the world is that, as we tinker, we have a capacity for choosing the best outcomes.
"We have the ability to identify our mistakes eventually better than average; that's what saves us." We choose the iPod over the Walkman. Medicine improved exponentially when the tinkering barber surgeons took over from the high theorists. They just went with what worked, irrespective of why it worked. Our sense of the good tinker is not infallible, but it might be just enough to turn away from the apocalypse that now threatens Extremistan.
He also wants to see diplomats dying of cirrhosis of the liver. It means they're talking and drinking and not going to war. Parties are among the great good things in Taleb's world.
And you and me? Well, the good investment strategy is to put 90% of your money in the safest possible government securities and the remaining 10% in a large number of high-risk ventures. This insulates you from bad black swans and exposes you to the possibility of good ones. Your smallest investment could go "convex" – explode – and make you rich. High-tech companies are the best. The downside risk is low if you get in at the start and the upside very high. Banks are the worst – all the risk is downside. Don't be tempted to play the stock market – "If people knew the risks they'd never invest."
There's much more to Taleb's view of the world than that. He is reluctant to talk about matters of human nature, ethics or any of the traditional concerns of philosophy because he says he hasn't read enough. But, when pressed, he comes alive.
"You have to worry about things you can do something about. I worry about people not being there and I want to make them aware." We should be mistrustful of knowledge. It is bad for us. Give a bookie 10 pieces of information about a race and he'll pick his horses. Give him 50 and his picks will be no better, but he will, fatally, be more confident.
We should be ecologically conservative – global warming may or may not be happening but why pollute the planet? – and probablistically conservative. The latter, however, has its limits. Nobody, not even Taleb, can live the sceptical life all the time – "It's an art, it's hard work." So he doesn't worry about crossing the road and doesn't lock his front door – "I can't start getting paranoid about that stuff." His wife locks it, however.
He believes in aristocratic – though not, he insists, elitist – values: elegance of manner and mind, grace under pressure, which is why you must shave before being executed. He believes in the Mediterranean way of talking and listening. One piece of advice he gives everybody is: go to lots of parties and listen, you might learn something by exposing yourself to black swans.
I ask him what he thinks are the primary human virtues, and eventually he comes up with magnanimity – punish your enemies but don't bear grudges; compassion – fairness always trumps efficiency; courage – very few people have this; and tenacity – tinker until it works for you.
"Let's be human the way we are human. Homo sum – I am a man. Don't accept any Olympian view of man and you will do better in society."
Above all, accept randomness. Accept that the world is opaque, majestically unknown and unknowable. From its depths emerge the black swans that can destroy us or make us free. Right now they're killing us, so remember to shave. But we can tinker our way out of it. It's what we do best. Listen to Taleb, an ancient figure, one of the great Mediterranean minds, when he says: "You find peace by coming to terms with what you don't know." Oh, and watch those carbs
Taleb's top life tips
1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3 It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5 Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.
6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take 'no' for an answer (conversely, take most 'yeses' as 'most probably').
8 Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
He is telling me how to live. "The only way you can say 'F*** you' to fate is by saying it's not going to affect how I live. So if somebody puts you to death, make sure you shave."
After lunch he takes me to Circuit City to buy two Olympus voice recorders, one for me and one for him. The one for him is to record his lectures – he charges about $60,000 for speaking engagements, so the $100 recorder is probably worth it. The one for me is because the day before he had drowned my Olympus with earl grey tea and, as he keeps saying, "I owe you." It didn't matter because I always use two recorders and, anyway, I had bought a replacement the next morning.
But it's important and it's not, strictly speaking, a cost to him. Every year he puts a few thousand dollars aside for contingencies – parking tickets, tea spills – and at the end of the year he gives what's left to charity. The money is gone from day one, so unexpected losses cause no pain. Now I have three Olympus recorders.
He spilt the tea – bear with me; this is important – while grabbing at his BlackBerry. He was agitated, reading every incoming e-mail, because the Indian consulate in New York had held on to his passport and he needed it to fly to Bermuda. People were being mobilised in New York and, for some reason, France, to get the passport.
The important thing is this: the lost passport and the spilt tea were black swans, bad birds that are always lurking, just out of sight, to catch you unawares and wreck your plans. Sometimes, however, they are good birds. The recorders cost $20 less than the marked price owing to a labelling screw-up at Circuit City. Stuff happens. The world is random, intrinsically unknowable. "You will never," he says, "be able to control randomness."
To explain: black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty.
"The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in."
Last May, Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It said, among many other things, that most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous. They live in a fantasy world in which the future can be controlled by sophisticated mathematical models and elaborate risk-management systems. Bankers and economists scorned and raged at Taleb. He didn't understand, they said. A few months later, the full global implications of the sub-prime-driven credit crunch became clear. The world banking system still teeters on the edge of meltdown. Taleb had been vindicated. "It was my greatest vindication. But to me that wasn't a black swan; it was a white swan. I knew it would happen and I said so. It was a black swan to Ben Bernanke [the chairman of the Federal Reserve]. I wouldn't use him to drive my car. These guys are dangerous. They're not qualified in their own field."
In December he lectured bankers at Société Générale, France's second biggest bank. He told them they were sitting on a mountain of risks – a menagerie of black swans. They didn't believe him. Six weeks later the rogue trader and black swan Jérôme Kerviel landed them with $7.2 billion of losses.
As a result, Taleb is now the hottest thinker in the world. He has a $4m advance on his next book. He gives about 30 presentations a year to bankers, economists, traders, even to Nasa, the US Fire Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. But he doesn't tell them what to do – he doesn't know. He just tells them how the world is. "I'm not a guru. I'm just describing a problem and saying, 'You deal with it.'"
Getting to know Taleb is a highly immersive experience. Everything matters. "Why are you not dressed Californian?" he asks at our first meeting. Everything in Newport Beach is very Californian. I'm wearing a jacket: it's cold. He's wearing shorts and a polo shirt. Clothes matter; they send signals. He warns against trusting anybody who wears a tie – "You have to ask, 'Why is he wearing a tie?'"
He has rules. In California he hires bikes, not cars. He doesn't usually carry his BlackBerry because he hates distraction and he really hates phone charges. But he does carry an Apple laptop everywhere and constantly uses it to illustrate complex points and seek out references. He says he answers every e-mail. He is sent thousands. He reads for 60 hours a week, but almost never a newspaper, and he never watches television.
"If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters."
But the biggest rule of all is his eccentric and punishing diet and exercise programme. He's been on it for three months and he's lost 20lb. He's following the thinking of Arthur De Vany, an economist – of the acceptable type – turned fitness guru. The theory is that we eat and exercise according to our evolved natures. Early man did not eat carbs, so they're out. He did not exercise regularly and he did not suffer long-term stress by having an annoying boss. Exercise must be irregular and ferocious – Taleb often does four hours in the gym or 360 press-ups and then nothing for 10 days. Jogging is useless; sprinting is good. He likes to knacker himself completely before a long flight. Stress should also be irregular and ferocious – early men did not have bad bosses, but they did occasionally run into lions.
He's always hungry. At both lunches he orders three salads, which he makes me share. Our conversation swings from high philosophy and low economics back to dietary matters like mangoes – bad – and apples – good as long as they are of an old variety. New ones are bred for sugar content. His regime works. He looks great – springy and fit. He shows me an old identity card. He is fat and middle-aged in the photo. He looks 10 years younger than that. "Look at me! That photo was taken seven years ago. No carbs!"
This is risk management – facing up to those aspects of randomness about which something can be done. Some years ago he narrowly survived throat cancer. The change in his voice was at first misdiagnosed as damaged vocal cords from his time on the trading floor. It can recur. Also he has a high familial risk of diabetes. He is convinced the diet of civilisation – full of carbs and sugar – is the problem. The grand doctors who once announced that complex carbohydrates are good for you are, to him, criminals responsible for thousands of deaths.
So, you are wondering, who is this guy? He was born in 1960 in Lebanon, though he casts doubt on both these "facts". The year is "close enough" – he doesn't like to give out his birth date because of identity theft and he doesn't believe in national character. He has, however, a regional identity; he calls himself a Levantine, a member of the indecipherably complex eastern Mediterranean civilisation. "My body and soul are Mediterranean."
Both maternal and paternal antecedents are grand, privileged and politically prominent. They are also Christian – Greek Orthodox. Startlingly, this great sceptic, this non-guru who believes in nothing, is still a practising Christian. He regards with some contempt the militant atheism movement led by Richard Dawkins.
"Scientists don't know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don't believe it has any negative impact on people's lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It's like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it's probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It's an aesthetic thing."
Take away religion, he says, and people start believing in nationalism, which has killed far more people. Religion is also a good way of handling uncertainty. It lowers blood pressure. He's convinced that religious people take fewer financial risks.
He was educated at a French school. Three traditions formed him: Greek Orthodox, French Catholic and Arab. They also taught him to disbelieve conventional wisdom. Each tradition had a different history of the crusades, utterly different. This led him to disbelieve historians almost as much as he does bankers.
But, crucially, he also learnt from a very early age that grown-ups have a dodgy grasp of probability. It was in the midst of the Lebanese civil war and, hiding from the guns and bombs, he heard adults repeatedly say the war would soon be over. It lasted 15 years. He became obsessed with probability and, after a degree in management from the Wharton business school at Pennsylvania University, he focused on probability for his PhD at the University of Paris.
For the non-mathematician, probability is an indecipherably complex field. But Taleb makes it easy by proving all the mathematics wrong. Let me introduce you to Brooklyn-born Fat Tony and academically inclined Dr John, two of Taleb's creations. You toss a coin 40 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of it coming up heads the 41st time? Dr John gives the answer drummed into the heads of every statistic student: 50/50. Fat Tony shakes his head and says the chances are no more than 1%. "You are either full of crap," he says, "or a pure sucker to buy that 50% business. The coin gotta be loaded."
The chances of a coin coming up heads 41 times are so small as to be effectively impossible in this universe. It is far, far more likely that somebody is cheating. Fat Tony wins. Dr John is the sucker. And the one thing that drives Taleb more than anything else is the determination not to be a sucker. Dr John is the economist or banker who thinks he can manage risk through mathematics. Fat Tony relies only on what happens in the real world.
In 1985, Taleb discovered how he could play Fat Tony in the markets. France, Germany, Japan, Britain and America signed an agreement to push down the value of the dollar. Taleb was working as an options trader at a French bank. He held options that had cost him almost nothing and that bet on the dollar's decline. Suddenly they were worth a fortune. He became obsessed with buying "out of the money" options. He had realised that when markets rise they tend to rise by small amounts, but when they fall – usually hit by a black swan – they fall a long way.
The big payoff came on October 19, 1987 – Black Monday. It was the biggest market drop in modern history. "That had vastly more influence on my thought than any other event in history."
It was a huge black swan – nobody had expected it, not even Taleb. But the point was, he was ready. He was sitting on a pile of out-of-the-money eurodollar options. So, while others were considering suicide, Taleb was sitting on profits of $35m to $40m. He had what he calls his "f***-off money", money that would allow him to walk away from any job and support him in his long-term desire to be a writer and philosopher.
He stayed on Wall Street until he got bored and moved to Chicago to become a trader in the pit, the open-outcry market run by the world's most sceptical people, all Fat Tonys. This he understood.
His first book, Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options, came out in 1997. He was moving away from being a pure trader, or "quant" – a quantitative analyst who applies sophisticated maths to investments – to being the philosopher he wanted to be. He was using the vast data pool provided by the markets and combining it with a sophisticated grasp of epistemology, the study of how and what we know, to form a synthesis unique in the modern world.
In the midst of this came his purest vindication prior to sub-prime. Long-Term Capital Management was a hedge fund set up in 1994 by, among others, Myron Scholes and Robert C Merton, joint winners of the 1997 Nobel prize in economics. It had the grandest of all possible credentials and used the most sophisticated academic theories of portfolio management. It went bust in 1998 and, because it had positions worth $1.25 trillion outstanding, it almost took the financial system down with it. Modern portfolio theory had not accounted for the black swan, the Russian financial crisis of that year. Taleb regards the Nobel prize in economics as a disgrace, a laughable endorsement of the worst kind of Dr John economics. Fat Tony should get the Nobel, but he's too smart. "People say to me, 'If economists are so incompetent, why do people listen to them?' I say, 'They don't listen, they're just teaching birds how to fly.' "
Taleb created his own hedge fund, Empirica, designed to help other hedge funds hedge their risks by using a refined form of his options wins – running small losses in quiet times and winning big in turbulent markets. It did okay but, after a good first year, performed poorly when the market went though a quiet spell. He's still involved in the markets, but mainly as a hobby – "like chess".
Finally, with two books – Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life, and The Black Swan – and a stream of academic papers, he turned himself into one of the giants of modern thought. They're still trying to tear him down, of course; last year The American Statistician journal devoted a whole issue to attacking The Black Swan. But I wouldn't bother. A bad but rather ignorant review in The New York Times resulted in such a savage rebuttal from Taleb on his website, www.fooledbyrandomness.com, that reviewers across the US pulled out in fear of his wrath. He knows his stuff and he keeps being right.
And what he knows does not sound good. The sub-prime crisis is not over and could get worse. Even if the US economy survives this one, it will remain a mountain of risk and delusion. "America is the greatest financial risk you can think of."
Its primary problem is that both banks and government are staffed by academic economists running their deluded models. Britain and Europe have better prospects because our economists tend to be more pragmatic, adapting to conditions rather than following models. But still we are dependent on American folly.
The central point is that we have created a world we don't understand. There's a place he calls Mediocristan. This was where early humans lived. Most events happened within a narrow range of probabilities – within the bell-curve distribution still taught to statistics students. But we don't live there any more. We live in Extremistan, where black swans proliferate, winners tend to take all and the rest get nothing – there's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and a lot of software writers living in a garage, there's Domingo and a thousand opera singers working in Starbucks. Our systems are complex but over-efficient. They have no redundancy, so a black swan strikes everybody at once. The banking system is the worst of all.
"Complex systems don't allow for slack and everybody protects that system. The banking system doesn't have that slack. In a normal ecology, banks go bankrupt every day. But in a complex system there is a tendency to cluster around powerful units. Every bank becomes the same bank so they can all go bust together."
He points out, chillingly, that banks make money from two sources. They take interest on our current accounts and charge us for services. This is easy, safe money. But they also take risks, big risks, with the whole panoply of loans, mortgages, derivatives and any other weird scam they can dream up. "Banks have never made a penny out of this, not a penny. They do well for a while and then lose it all in a big crash."
On top of that, Taleb has shown that increased economic concentration has raised our vulnerability to natural disasters. The Kobe earthquake of 1995 cost a lot more than the Tokyo earthquake of 1923. And there are countless other ways in which we have built a world ruled by black swans – some good but mostly bad. So what do we do as individuals and the world? In the case of the world, Taleb doesn't know. He doesn't make predictions, he insults people paid to do so by telling them to get another job. All forecasts about the oil price, for example, are always wrong, though people keep doing it. But he knows how the world will end.
"Governments and policy makers don't understand the world in which we live, so if somebody is going to destroy the world, it is the Bank of England saving Northern Rock. The biggest danger to human society comes from civil servants in an environment like this. In their attempt to control the ecology, they don't understand that the link between action and consequences can be more vicious. Civil servants say they need to make forecasts, but it's totally irresponsible to make people rely on you without telling them you're incompetent."
Bear Stearns – the US Northern Rock – was another vindication for Taleb. He's always said that whatever deal you do, you always end up dealing with J P Morgan. It was JPM that picked up Bear at a bargain-basement price. Banks should be more like New York restaurants. They come and go but the restaurant business as a whole survives and thrives and the food gets better. Banks fail but bankers still get millions in bonuses for applying their useless models. Restaurants tinker, they work by trial and error and watch real results in the real world. Taleb believes in tinkering – it was to be the title of his next book. Trial and error will save us from ourselves because they capture benign black swans. Look at the three big inventions of our time: lasers, computers and the internet. They were all produced by tinkering and none of them ended up doing what their inventors intended them to do. All were black swans. The big hope for the world is that, as we tinker, we have a capacity for choosing the best outcomes.
"We have the ability to identify our mistakes eventually better than average; that's what saves us." We choose the iPod over the Walkman. Medicine improved exponentially when the tinkering barber surgeons took over from the high theorists. They just went with what worked, irrespective of why it worked. Our sense of the good tinker is not infallible, but it might be just enough to turn away from the apocalypse that now threatens Extremistan.
He also wants to see diplomats dying of cirrhosis of the liver. It means they're talking and drinking and not going to war. Parties are among the great good things in Taleb's world.
And you and me? Well, the good investment strategy is to put 90% of your money in the safest possible government securities and the remaining 10% in a large number of high-risk ventures. This insulates you from bad black swans and exposes you to the possibility of good ones. Your smallest investment could go "convex" – explode – and make you rich. High-tech companies are the best. The downside risk is low if you get in at the start and the upside very high. Banks are the worst – all the risk is downside. Don't be tempted to play the stock market – "If people knew the risks they'd never invest."
There's much more to Taleb's view of the world than that. He is reluctant to talk about matters of human nature, ethics or any of the traditional concerns of philosophy because he says he hasn't read enough. But, when pressed, he comes alive.
"You have to worry about things you can do something about. I worry about people not being there and I want to make them aware." We should be mistrustful of knowledge. It is bad for us. Give a bookie 10 pieces of information about a race and he'll pick his horses. Give him 50 and his picks will be no better, but he will, fatally, be more confident.
We should be ecologically conservative – global warming may or may not be happening but why pollute the planet? – and probablistically conservative. The latter, however, has its limits. Nobody, not even Taleb, can live the sceptical life all the time – "It's an art, it's hard work." So he doesn't worry about crossing the road and doesn't lock his front door – "I can't start getting paranoid about that stuff." His wife locks it, however.
He believes in aristocratic – though not, he insists, elitist – values: elegance of manner and mind, grace under pressure, which is why you must shave before being executed. He believes in the Mediterranean way of talking and listening. One piece of advice he gives everybody is: go to lots of parties and listen, you might learn something by exposing yourself to black swans.
I ask him what he thinks are the primary human virtues, and eventually he comes up with magnanimity – punish your enemies but don't bear grudges; compassion – fairness always trumps efficiency; courage – very few people have this; and tenacity – tinker until it works for you.
"Let's be human the way we are human. Homo sum – I am a man. Don't accept any Olympian view of man and you will do better in society."
Above all, accept randomness. Accept that the world is opaque, majestically unknown and unknowable. From its depths emerge the black swans that can destroy us or make us free. Right now they're killing us, so remember to shave. But we can tinker our way out of it. It's what we do best. Listen to Taleb, an ancient figure, one of the great Mediterranean minds, when he says: "You find peace by coming to terms with what you don't know." Oh, and watch those carbs
Taleb's top life tips
1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3 It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5 Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.
6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take 'no' for an answer (conversely, take most 'yeses' as 'most probably').
8 Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
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A lament for the death of the left
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: A lament for the death of the left as a political force
Most depressing is the sight of black and Asian Britons following the wind blowing Tories to victory
Monday, 2 June 2008
"The best champagne and the best people" I was told, celebrated the launch of Standpoint, a magazine aiming to "celebrate Western civilisation", to reassert its dominance, shaken up by the effrontery of 9/11. It is edited by Daniel Johnson, son of Paul Johnson, the leftie who turned rabid right. His other son Luke, a libertarian, presides over Channel4 as chairman. Enthusiastic guests included Sir Tom Stoppard, Sir Vidia Naipaul, Frank Field and Nasir Ali, Bishop of Rochester, who appears to want to compel us all to join his church.
The sun now rises on the right and those of us on the other side are left despondent as we anticipate a prolonged winter of discontent. We, who believe in fairness, equality, human rights and universal justice, are of no consequence. The fever of failure consumes our hopes and there is no relief as we witness the collapse of the British Left and the ideals that defined post-war advancement in this country, turning an obstinately class-riven, imperial nation into a model of progressive politics.
Local election results show the country lurching right, in some parts even embracing the BNP. Instead of condemning the scum, Britons are instructed to "understand" why these voters are "driven" to vote for neo-Nazis. We are simultaneously warned to show no such understanding of young Muslims who are seduced by hate-filled Imams. White resentment of "foreigners" is no more respectable than Muslim hatred of Westerners. Yet in our unequal world it is.
The coup was complete when Boris took over our London, world city, colourful home of mavericks, revolutionaries and monarchs, radicals and cultural conformists, money makers and penniless refugees, the hopeless and hopeful. And so power inexorably shifts towards authoritarianism, new imperial arrogance and design (bafflingly known as "liberal intervention"), fundamentalist Christian revivalism, enforced assimilation ("You WILL love and only ever praise this country"), racism and cultural protectionism, Anglo-Saxon privilege and unregulated capitalism which creates both appalling levels of wealth and poverty. The media serves the new master class and credo, with some notable exceptions.
How did we get here? Are right-wing ideas and policies irresistible to the British public (always more conservative than most European partners) and is this a return to the natural state of this nation? Or do we blame the wretched cowardice of the Left, which took power by surrendering its body and soul? Labour elected Tony Blair as leader knowing he was never a socialist; he continued Thatcherism, only with the zeal and underlying self-doubt of someone who felt trapped in political disguise. She stood as an equal to Reagan; Blair was a supplicant to Bush.
Meanwhile, Gordon Brown is too scared to be the authentic leftie he was believed to be and instead flaps around, allies himself with preposterously extreme measures, so extreme that Cameron, can, with easy conscience oppose them.
Banging up suspect terrorists for forty two days in detention without charge is exactly that kind of Big Boy gesture that reveals wobbly conviction, shaky commitment to those principles that make this nation a free and great democracy.
Almost more depressing is the sight of black and Asian Britons following the wind blowing the Tories to victory. Boris has recruited Afro Caribbean "leaders" who believe in physical chastisement and smart young Asians who deny the existence of racism and want an end to political correctness. The more old-fashioned Uncle Toms and their female equivalents are now expediently making themselves known to the Tories and right-wing think tanks.
For reasons I have yet to fathom, two weeks ago, I was invited to address a meeting at the House of Lords organised by the Conservative Muslim Forum. The room was full and the discussion on Muslim women lively. Many there were previously New Labour acolytes; others were young and ambitious and now devoted to the charismatic Cameron. To see such enthusiasm for a party whose members have always opposed our presence on these shores was a wake-up slap. All over now. The right has crushed the left.
By the time our time comes around again, I will be pushing up the daisies or dancing half naked in some home for sufferers of senile dementia, a blessing perhaps, to be lost in irreversible lunacy and never again to care about what happens to politics. Still, between now and then there will be plenty to moan about.
Most depressing is the sight of black and Asian Britons following the wind blowing Tories to victory
Monday, 2 June 2008
"The best champagne and the best people" I was told, celebrated the launch of Standpoint, a magazine aiming to "celebrate Western civilisation", to reassert its dominance, shaken up by the effrontery of 9/11. It is edited by Daniel Johnson, son of Paul Johnson, the leftie who turned rabid right. His other son Luke, a libertarian, presides over Channel4 as chairman. Enthusiastic guests included Sir Tom Stoppard, Sir Vidia Naipaul, Frank Field and Nasir Ali, Bishop of Rochester, who appears to want to compel us all to join his church.
The sun now rises on the right and those of us on the other side are left despondent as we anticipate a prolonged winter of discontent. We, who believe in fairness, equality, human rights and universal justice, are of no consequence. The fever of failure consumes our hopes and there is no relief as we witness the collapse of the British Left and the ideals that defined post-war advancement in this country, turning an obstinately class-riven, imperial nation into a model of progressive politics.
Local election results show the country lurching right, in some parts even embracing the BNP. Instead of condemning the scum, Britons are instructed to "understand" why these voters are "driven" to vote for neo-Nazis. We are simultaneously warned to show no such understanding of young Muslims who are seduced by hate-filled Imams. White resentment of "foreigners" is no more respectable than Muslim hatred of Westerners. Yet in our unequal world it is.
The coup was complete when Boris took over our London, world city, colourful home of mavericks, revolutionaries and monarchs, radicals and cultural conformists, money makers and penniless refugees, the hopeless and hopeful. And so power inexorably shifts towards authoritarianism, new imperial arrogance and design (bafflingly known as "liberal intervention"), fundamentalist Christian revivalism, enforced assimilation ("You WILL love and only ever praise this country"), racism and cultural protectionism, Anglo-Saxon privilege and unregulated capitalism which creates both appalling levels of wealth and poverty. The media serves the new master class and credo, with some notable exceptions.
How did we get here? Are right-wing ideas and policies irresistible to the British public (always more conservative than most European partners) and is this a return to the natural state of this nation? Or do we blame the wretched cowardice of the Left, which took power by surrendering its body and soul? Labour elected Tony Blair as leader knowing he was never a socialist; he continued Thatcherism, only with the zeal and underlying self-doubt of someone who felt trapped in political disguise. She stood as an equal to Reagan; Blair was a supplicant to Bush.
Meanwhile, Gordon Brown is too scared to be the authentic leftie he was believed to be and instead flaps around, allies himself with preposterously extreme measures, so extreme that Cameron, can, with easy conscience oppose them.
Banging up suspect terrorists for forty two days in detention without charge is exactly that kind of Big Boy gesture that reveals wobbly conviction, shaky commitment to those principles that make this nation a free and great democracy.
Almost more depressing is the sight of black and Asian Britons following the wind blowing the Tories to victory. Boris has recruited Afro Caribbean "leaders" who believe in physical chastisement and smart young Asians who deny the existence of racism and want an end to political correctness. The more old-fashioned Uncle Toms and their female equivalents are now expediently making themselves known to the Tories and right-wing think tanks.
For reasons I have yet to fathom, two weeks ago, I was invited to address a meeting at the House of Lords organised by the Conservative Muslim Forum. The room was full and the discussion on Muslim women lively. Many there were previously New Labour acolytes; others were young and ambitious and now devoted to the charismatic Cameron. To see such enthusiasm for a party whose members have always opposed our presence on these shores was a wake-up slap. All over now. The right has crushed the left.
By the time our time comes around again, I will be pushing up the daisies or dancing half naked in some home for sufferers of senile dementia, a blessing perhaps, to be lost in irreversible lunacy and never again to care about what happens to politics. Still, between now and then there will be plenty to moan about.
Thursday 29 May 2008
The world must end its addiction to oil
Johann Hari:
Thursday, 29 May 2008
This week, a battalion of angry addicts brought London to a standstill. They snarled up the traffic, then marched on 10 Downing Street to demand their fix at prices they can afford. Across the world, in countries as different as the US and Iran, fellow junkies are rising up in rage. Their addiction is to a gloopy black drug called petrol – and we are all about to go cold turkey.
In the past seven years, the price of oil has soared from $30 (£15) a barrel to $140. By the end of next year it could be at $200. No matter how much we plead or howl at our governments, it will never go back: the final act of the Age of Oil has begun.
The era that is ending began at 10.30am on 10 January 1901, on a high hill called Spindletop in south-eastern Texas. A pair of pioneer brothers managed to drill down into the biggest oilfield ever found. Until then, the dribbles of oil that had been discovered were used only for kerosene lamps – but within a decade, this vast gushing supply was driving the entire global economy. It made the 20th century – its glories, and its gutters – possible. Humans were suddenly able to use in one frenetic burst an energy supply that had taken 150 million years to build up. A species that died before the age of 40 after a life of boring, back-breaking labour spurted forward so far and so fast that today billions live into their eighties after a life of leisure and plenty.
Oil now drives everything we do. It shuttles us across the globe, we fight wars for it, and we even eat it: to farm a single cow and deliver it to slaughter burns up six barrels of oil – enough to drive from New York to LA. That's why food becomes expensive when oil becomes expensive.
It is totally understandable that most of us want to live forever in that sweet niche in history when we had seemingly infinite reservoirs of oil, and no awareness that burning it would, in time, burn us too. But, alas, we need to wake up and smell the fumes. There are three reasons why the placebos demanded by the petrol protesters and the politicians cowering from them across the world – lower taxes! find more oil! dig! burn! – are a delusion.
Reality Check One: Petrol is finite. There is a limited amount of oil in the world, and we have already burned more than 900 billion barrels of it. There is a complex scientific debate about when we will reach the point of "peak oil", when we will have used up more than half of all the supplies on earth. Some geologists think this moment has already passed. Others – mostly oil industry flunkies – think we have as long as 30 years to go. But all agree the remaining oil is harder to reach, and much of it can never be accessed.
The facts are stark. All the biggest oilfields on earth were discovered before my parents were born. The discovery of new oilfields peaked in 1965, and has been falling ever since. The last year in which humans found more oil than we burned was the year I was born: 1979.
So we have a diminishing supply – at the very moment when billions more people want access to it. Car ownership in India has trebled in the past decade, and it will treble again by 2020. In China, three-quarters of urban Chinese say they plan to buy a car in the next five years. These factors mean we are unquestionably moving from having a world with growing pools of cheap oil to dwindling supplies of expensive oil.
Reality Check Two: Even if we had infinite supplies of free petrol, we couldn't afford to use it without dramatically destabilising the climate. To use just a few examples: Spain and Australia are currently suffering their worst droughts since records began, and several cities are on the brink of running out of drinking water. The oceans are rapidly turning more acidic, to levels scientists didn't expect to see until 2050. The Arctic is now almost free of sea ice in the summer.
This is all with just one degree of global warming. The world's climatologists agree that if we burn up most of the remaining dribbles of oil on earth, we could be on course for six degrees this century. The last time the world warmed so quickly was 251 million years ago – and 95 per cent of everything on earth died.
Reality Check Three: Our addiction to oil means we can never undermine the Islamic fundamentalists who want to kill us – and often actually help them.
Most of the world's remaining oil is in the Middle East. In order to access it, we have a twin-track policy. To start with, we support the most repressive dictatorship in the region – the torturing, sharia-law enforcing House of Saud – because they keep the supply running nicely. The Saudi state then uses the money we pay at the pump to fund a vast network of extreme madrasahs and mosques across the world – including within the US and Europe – preaching that democracy is "evil", women should be subordinated, Jews are "pigs and apes", and gays should be killed. We do not query this because, as the writer Thomas Friedman put it, "junkies don't tell the truth to their dealers".
Where we cannot find a friendly local tyrant, we invade the country in order to control the oil ourselves. Even John McCain admitted this month that Iraq was about oil, arguing that energy independence would "prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East." (He later claimed with a red face he was talking exclusively about the first Iraq war.)
On their own, each of these inconvenient truths would be enough to require us to begin an urgent transition away from petrol. Together, they are unanswerable.
Of course it's tempting to draw the oily covers over our head and cry for tiny little steps like cutting a few pence off petrol taxes, or squeezing out a few more barrels as Gordon Brown begged yesterday. But these measures would be at best a local anaesthetic, putting off the moment when the rapid transition to a global economy run on carbon-free energy sources must start.
The longer we delay, the harder it will be. As Paul Roberts puts in his book The End of Oil: "The real question is not whether change is going to come, but whether the shift will be peaceful and orderly or chaotic and violent because we waited too long to begin planning for it."
Every penny now should be spent not on perpetuating petrol, but on developing and disseminating alternative fuels. The addiction that began a century ago on a hill in Texas is ending – and we have no choice but to check en masse into petro-rehab.
Thursday, 29 May 2008
This week, a battalion of angry addicts brought London to a standstill. They snarled up the traffic, then marched on 10 Downing Street to demand their fix at prices they can afford. Across the world, in countries as different as the US and Iran, fellow junkies are rising up in rage. Their addiction is to a gloopy black drug called petrol – and we are all about to go cold turkey.
In the past seven years, the price of oil has soared from $30 (£15) a barrel to $140. By the end of next year it could be at $200. No matter how much we plead or howl at our governments, it will never go back: the final act of the Age of Oil has begun.
The era that is ending began at 10.30am on 10 January 1901, on a high hill called Spindletop in south-eastern Texas. A pair of pioneer brothers managed to drill down into the biggest oilfield ever found. Until then, the dribbles of oil that had been discovered were used only for kerosene lamps – but within a decade, this vast gushing supply was driving the entire global economy. It made the 20th century – its glories, and its gutters – possible. Humans were suddenly able to use in one frenetic burst an energy supply that had taken 150 million years to build up. A species that died before the age of 40 after a life of boring, back-breaking labour spurted forward so far and so fast that today billions live into their eighties after a life of leisure and plenty.
Oil now drives everything we do. It shuttles us across the globe, we fight wars for it, and we even eat it: to farm a single cow and deliver it to slaughter burns up six barrels of oil – enough to drive from New York to LA. That's why food becomes expensive when oil becomes expensive.
It is totally understandable that most of us want to live forever in that sweet niche in history when we had seemingly infinite reservoirs of oil, and no awareness that burning it would, in time, burn us too. But, alas, we need to wake up and smell the fumes. There are three reasons why the placebos demanded by the petrol protesters and the politicians cowering from them across the world – lower taxes! find more oil! dig! burn! – are a delusion.
Reality Check One: Petrol is finite. There is a limited amount of oil in the world, and we have already burned more than 900 billion barrels of it. There is a complex scientific debate about when we will reach the point of "peak oil", when we will have used up more than half of all the supplies on earth. Some geologists think this moment has already passed. Others – mostly oil industry flunkies – think we have as long as 30 years to go. But all agree the remaining oil is harder to reach, and much of it can never be accessed.
The facts are stark. All the biggest oilfields on earth were discovered before my parents were born. The discovery of new oilfields peaked in 1965, and has been falling ever since. The last year in which humans found more oil than we burned was the year I was born: 1979.
So we have a diminishing supply – at the very moment when billions more people want access to it. Car ownership in India has trebled in the past decade, and it will treble again by 2020. In China, three-quarters of urban Chinese say they plan to buy a car in the next five years. These factors mean we are unquestionably moving from having a world with growing pools of cheap oil to dwindling supplies of expensive oil.
Reality Check Two: Even if we had infinite supplies of free petrol, we couldn't afford to use it without dramatically destabilising the climate. To use just a few examples: Spain and Australia are currently suffering their worst droughts since records began, and several cities are on the brink of running out of drinking water. The oceans are rapidly turning more acidic, to levels scientists didn't expect to see until 2050. The Arctic is now almost free of sea ice in the summer.
This is all with just one degree of global warming. The world's climatologists agree that if we burn up most of the remaining dribbles of oil on earth, we could be on course for six degrees this century. The last time the world warmed so quickly was 251 million years ago – and 95 per cent of everything on earth died.
Reality Check Three: Our addiction to oil means we can never undermine the Islamic fundamentalists who want to kill us – and often actually help them.
Most of the world's remaining oil is in the Middle East. In order to access it, we have a twin-track policy. To start with, we support the most repressive dictatorship in the region – the torturing, sharia-law enforcing House of Saud – because they keep the supply running nicely. The Saudi state then uses the money we pay at the pump to fund a vast network of extreme madrasahs and mosques across the world – including within the US and Europe – preaching that democracy is "evil", women should be subordinated, Jews are "pigs and apes", and gays should be killed. We do not query this because, as the writer Thomas Friedman put it, "junkies don't tell the truth to their dealers".
Where we cannot find a friendly local tyrant, we invade the country in order to control the oil ourselves. Even John McCain admitted this month that Iraq was about oil, arguing that energy independence would "prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East." (He later claimed with a red face he was talking exclusively about the first Iraq war.)
On their own, each of these inconvenient truths would be enough to require us to begin an urgent transition away from petrol. Together, they are unanswerable.
Of course it's tempting to draw the oily covers over our head and cry for tiny little steps like cutting a few pence off petrol taxes, or squeezing out a few more barrels as Gordon Brown begged yesterday. But these measures would be at best a local anaesthetic, putting off the moment when the rapid transition to a global economy run on carbon-free energy sources must start.
The longer we delay, the harder it will be. As Paul Roberts puts in his book The End of Oil: "The real question is not whether change is going to come, but whether the shift will be peaceful and orderly or chaotic and violent because we waited too long to begin planning for it."
Every penny now should be spent not on perpetuating petrol, but on developing and disseminating alternative fuels. The addiction that began a century ago on a hill in Texas is ending – and we have no choice but to check en masse into petro-rehab.
Tuesday 27 May 2008
Oil price mocks fuel realities
By F William Engdahl
As business and consumers consider the implications for them of crude oil selling at US$130-plus per barrel, they should bear in mind that, at a conservative calculation, at least 60% of that price comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds, banks and financial groups using the London ICE Futures and New York Nymex futures exchanges and uncontrolled inter-bank or over-the-counter trading to avoid scrutiny (see Speculators knock OPEC off oil-price perch, Asia Times Online, May 6, 2008).
US margin rules of the government's Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex by paying only 6% of the value of the contract. At the present price of around $130 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120.
This extreme "leverage" of 16 to one helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in subprime and other disasters at the expense of the overall population.
The hoax of "peak oil" - namely the argument that oil production has hit the point where more than half all reserves have been used and the world is on the downslope of oil at cheap price and abundant quantity - has enabled this costly fraud to continue since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the help of key banks, oil traders and big oil majors.
Washington is trying to shift blame, as always, to Arab oil producers and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The problem is not a lack of crude oil supply. In fact, the world is in over-supply now. Yet the price climbs relentlessly higher. Why? The answer lies in what are clearly deliberate US government policies that permit the unbridled oil price manipulations.
World oil demand flat, prices boom
The chief market strategist for one of the world's leading oil industry banks, David Kelly, of JP Morgan Funds, recently admitted something telling to the Washington Post: "One of the things I think is very important to realize is that the growth in the world oil consumption is not that strong."
One of the stories used to support the oil futures speculators is the allegation that China's demand for imported oil is exploding out of control, driving shortages in the supply-demand equilibrium. Yet the facts do not support the China demand thesis.
The US government's Energy Information Administration (EIA) concluded in its most recent monthly Short Term Energy Outlook report that US oil demand is expected to decline by 190,000 barrels per day (b/d) this year. That is mainly owing to the deepening economic recession.
Chinese consumption, the EIA says, far from exploding, is expected to increase this year by only 400,000 barrels a day. That is hardly the "surging oil demand" blamed on China in the media. Last year, China imported 3.2 million barrels per day, and its estimated usage was around 7 million b/d total. The US, by contrast, consumes around 20.7 million b/d.
That means the key oil-consuming nation, the US, is experiencing a significant drop in demand. China, which consumes only a third of the oil the US does, will see a minor rise in import demand compared with the total daily world oil output of some 84 million barrels, less than half of one percent of total demand.
OPEC has its 2008 global oil demand growth forecast unchanged at 1.2 million barrels per day (mm bpd), as slowing economic growth in the industrialized world is offset by slightly growing consumption in developing nations. OPEC predicts that global oil demand in 2008 will average 87 million bpd, largely unchanged from its previous estimate. Demand from China, the Middle East, India and Latin America is forecast to be stronger, but the European Union and North American demand will be lower.
So the world's largest oil consumer faces a sharp decline in consumption, a decline that will worsen as the housing and related economic effects of the US securitization crisis in finance de-leverages. The price in normal open or transparent markets should presumably be falling not rising. No supply crisis justifies the way the world's oil is being priced today.
Big new oil fields coming online
Not only is there no supply crisis to justify such a price bubble. There are several giant new oil fields due to begin production over the course of 2008 to further add to supply.
The world's single-largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, is finalizing plans to boost drilling activity by a third and increase investments by 40%. Saudi Aramco's plan, which runs from 2009 to 2013, is expected to be approved by the company's board and the Oil Ministry this month. The kingdom is in the midst of a $50 billion oil production expansion plan to meet growing demand in Asia and other emerging markets and is expected to boost its pumping capacity to a total of 12.5 mm bpd by next year, about 11% up from the present capacity of 11.3 mm bpd.
In April this year, Saudi Arabia's Khursaniyah oilfield began pumping and will soon add another 500,000 bpd to world oil supply of high grade Arabian light crude. In addition, the country's Khurais oilfield development, the largest of Saudi Aramco's projects, will boost the production capacity of Saudi oilfields from 11.3 million bpd to 12.5 million bpd by 2009. Khurais is planned to add another 1.2 million bpd of high-quality Arabian light crude to Saudi Arabia's export capacity.
Brazil's Petrobras is in the early phase of exploiting newly confirmed oil reserves offshore in its Tupi field that could be as great or greater than the North Sea. Petrobras says the new ultra-deep Tupi field could hold as much as 8 billion barrels of recoverable light crude. When online in a few years it is expected to put Brazil among the world's "top 10" oil producers, between Nigeria and those of Venezuela.
In the US, aside from rumors that the big oil companies have been deliberately sitting on vast new reserves in Alaska for fear that the prices of recent years would plunge on over-supply, the US Geological Survey (USGS)recently issued a report that confirmed major new oil reserves in an area called the Bakken, which stretches across North Dakota, Montana and south-eastern Saskatchewan. The USGS estimates up to 3.65 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken.
These are just several confirmations of large new oil reserves to be exploited. Iraq, where the Anglo-American Big Four oil majors are salivating to get their hands on unexplored fields, is believed to hold oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia while much of the world has yet to be explored for oil. At prices above $60 a barrel huge new potentials become economic. The major problem faced by Big Oil is not finding replacement oil but keeping the lid on world oil finds in order to maintain present exorbitant prices. Here they have some help from Wall Street banks and the two major oil trade exchanges - Nymex and London-Atlanta's ICE and ICE Futures.
Then why do prices still rise?
There is growing evidence that the recent speculative bubble in oil, which has gone asymptotic since January, is about to pop. Late last month, in Dallas, Texas, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists held its annual conference, with major oil executives and geologists present. According to one participant, knowledgeable oil industry chief executives reached the consensus that "oil prices will likely soon drop dramatically and the long-term price increases will be in natural gas".
Just a few days earlier, Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank, had said that the current oil price bubble was coming to an end. Michael Waldron, the bank's chief oil strategist, was quoted in Britain's Daily Telegraph on April 24 saying, "Oil supply is outpacing demand growth. Inventories have been building since the beginning of the year."
In the US, stockpiles of oil climbed by almost 12 million barrels in April according to the May 7 EIA monthly report on inventory, up by nearly 33 million barrels since January. At the same time, MasterCard's May 7 US gasoline report showed that gas demand has fallen by 5.8%. And refiners are reducing their refining rates dramatically to adjust to the falling gasoline demand. They are now running at 85% of capacity, down from 89% a year ago, in a season when production is normally 95%. The refiners today are clearly trying to draw down gasoline inventories to bid gasoline prices up. "It's the economy, stupid," to paraphrase Bill Clinton's infamous 1992 election quip to daddy Bush. It's called economic recession.
The May 8 report from Oil Movements, a British company that tracks oil shipments worldwide, shows that oil in transit on the high seas is also quite strong. Almost every category of shipment is running higher than it was a year ago. The report notes that, "In the West, a big share of any oil stock building done this year has happened offshore, out of sight." Some industry insiders say the global oil industry from the activities and stocks of the Big Four to the true state of tanker and storage and liftings, is the most secretive industry in the world with the possible exception of the narcotics trade.
Goldman Sachs again in the middle
The oil price today, unlike 20 years ago, is determined behind closed doors in the trading rooms of giant financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank or UBS. The key exchange in the game is the London ICE Futures Exchange (formerly the International Petroleum Exchange). ICE Futures is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Atlanta Georgia International Commodities Exchange. ICE in Atlanta was founded in part by Goldman Sachs, which also happens to run the world's most widely used commodity price index, the GSCI, which is over-weighted to oil prices.
As I noted in my earlier article, ICE was the focus of a recent congressional investigation. It was named both in the Senate's Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations' June 27, 2006, Staff Report and in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce's hearing in December 2007, which looked into unregulated trading in energy futures.
Both studies concluded that the energy price climb to $128 and beyond is driven by billions of dollars' worth of oil and natural gas futures contracts being placed on the ICE. Through a convenient regulation exception granted by the George W Bush administration in January 2006, the ICE Futures trading of US energy futures is not regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), even though the ICE Futures US oil contracts are traded in ICE affiliates in the US. And at Enron's request, the CFTC exempted the over-the-counter oil futures trades in 2000.
So it is no surprise to see in a May 6 report from Reuters that Goldman Sachs announces oil could in fact be on the verge of another "super spike", possibly taking oil as high as $200 a barrel within the next six to 24 months. That headline, "$200 a barrel!" became the major news story on oil for the next two days. How many gullible lemmings followed behind with their money bets?
Arjun Murti, Goldman Sachs' energy strategist, blamed what he called "blistering" (sic) demand from China and the Middle East, combined with his assertion that the Middle East is nearing its maximum ability to produce more oil. "Peak oil" mythology again helps Wall Street. The degree of unfounded hype reminds one of the self-serving Wall Street hype in 1999-2000 around dot.com stocks or Enron.
In 2001, just before the dot.com crash in the NASDAQ, some Wall Street firms were pushing the sale to the gullible public of stocks that their companies were quietly dumping. Or they were pushing dubious stocks for companies where their affiliated banks had a financial interest. In short, as later came out in Congressional investigations, companies with a vested interest in a certain financial outcome used the media to line their pockets and that of their companies, leaving the public investor holding the bag.
It would be interesting for Congress to subpoena the records of the futures positions of Goldman Sachs and a handful of other major energy futures players to see if they are invested to gain from a further rise in oil to $200, not forgetting that 16 to one leverage with which a hedge fund or bank can buy oil futures.
We are hit with an endless series of plausible arguments for the high price of oil: a "terrorism risk premium", a "blistering" rise in demand of China and India; unrest in the Nigerian oil region; oil pipelines' blown up in Iraq; possible war with Iran ... And above all the hype about peak oil. Oil speculator T Boone Pickens has reportedly raked in a huge profit on oil futures and argues, conveniently, that the world is on the cusp of "peak oil". So does the Houston investment banker and friend of Vice President Dick Cheney, Matt Simmons.
As noted in the June 2006 US Senate report, The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices, "There's a few hedge fund managers out there who are masters at knowing how to exploit the peak oil theories and hot buttons of supply and demand, and by making bold predictions of shocking price advancements to come they only add more fuel to the bullish fire in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy."
Will a Democratic Congress act to change the carefully crafted opaque oil futures markets in an election year and risk bursting the bubble? On May 12, the House Energy and Commerce Committee stated it will look at this issue in June.
F William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (PlutoPress), and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (Global Research, available at www.globalresearch.ca). He may be reached at info@engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
Get fish-slapping on Messenger! Play Now
As business and consumers consider the implications for them of crude oil selling at US$130-plus per barrel, they should bear in mind that, at a conservative calculation, at least 60% of that price comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds, banks and financial groups using the London ICE Futures and New York Nymex futures exchanges and uncontrolled inter-bank or over-the-counter trading to avoid scrutiny (see Speculators knock OPEC off oil-price perch, Asia Times Online, May 6, 2008).
US margin rules of the government's Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex by paying only 6% of the value of the contract. At the present price of around $130 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120.
This extreme "leverage" of 16 to one helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in subprime and other disasters at the expense of the overall population.
The hoax of "peak oil" - namely the argument that oil production has hit the point where more than half all reserves have been used and the world is on the downslope of oil at cheap price and abundant quantity - has enabled this costly fraud to continue since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the help of key banks, oil traders and big oil majors.
Washington is trying to shift blame, as always, to Arab oil producers and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The problem is not a lack of crude oil supply. In fact, the world is in over-supply now. Yet the price climbs relentlessly higher. Why? The answer lies in what are clearly deliberate US government policies that permit the unbridled oil price manipulations.
World oil demand flat, prices boom
The chief market strategist for one of the world's leading oil industry banks, David Kelly, of JP Morgan Funds, recently admitted something telling to the Washington Post: "One of the things I think is very important to realize is that the growth in the world oil consumption is not that strong."
One of the stories used to support the oil futures speculators is the allegation that China's demand for imported oil is exploding out of control, driving shortages in the supply-demand equilibrium. Yet the facts do not support the China demand thesis.
The US government's Energy Information Administration (EIA) concluded in its most recent monthly Short Term Energy Outlook report that US oil demand is expected to decline by 190,000 barrels per day (b/d) this year. That is mainly owing to the deepening economic recession.
Chinese consumption, the EIA says, far from exploding, is expected to increase this year by only 400,000 barrels a day. That is hardly the "surging oil demand" blamed on China in the media. Last year, China imported 3.2 million barrels per day, and its estimated usage was around 7 million b/d total. The US, by contrast, consumes around 20.7 million b/d.
That means the key oil-consuming nation, the US, is experiencing a significant drop in demand. China, which consumes only a third of the oil the US does, will see a minor rise in import demand compared with the total daily world oil output of some 84 million barrels, less than half of one percent of total demand.
OPEC has its 2008 global oil demand growth forecast unchanged at 1.2 million barrels per day (mm bpd), as slowing economic growth in the industrialized world is offset by slightly growing consumption in developing nations. OPEC predicts that global oil demand in 2008 will average 87 million bpd, largely unchanged from its previous estimate. Demand from China, the Middle East, India and Latin America is forecast to be stronger, but the European Union and North American demand will be lower.
So the world's largest oil consumer faces a sharp decline in consumption, a decline that will worsen as the housing and related economic effects of the US securitization crisis in finance de-leverages. The price in normal open or transparent markets should presumably be falling not rising. No supply crisis justifies the way the world's oil is being priced today.
Big new oil fields coming online
Not only is there no supply crisis to justify such a price bubble. There are several giant new oil fields due to begin production over the course of 2008 to further add to supply.
The world's single-largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, is finalizing plans to boost drilling activity by a third and increase investments by 40%. Saudi Aramco's plan, which runs from 2009 to 2013, is expected to be approved by the company's board and the Oil Ministry this month. The kingdom is in the midst of a $50 billion oil production expansion plan to meet growing demand in Asia and other emerging markets and is expected to boost its pumping capacity to a total of 12.5 mm bpd by next year, about 11% up from the present capacity of 11.3 mm bpd.
In April this year, Saudi Arabia's Khursaniyah oilfield began pumping and will soon add another 500,000 bpd to world oil supply of high grade Arabian light crude. In addition, the country's Khurais oilfield development, the largest of Saudi Aramco's projects, will boost the production capacity of Saudi oilfields from 11.3 million bpd to 12.5 million bpd by 2009. Khurais is planned to add another 1.2 million bpd of high-quality Arabian light crude to Saudi Arabia's export capacity.
Brazil's Petrobras is in the early phase of exploiting newly confirmed oil reserves offshore in its Tupi field that could be as great or greater than the North Sea. Petrobras says the new ultra-deep Tupi field could hold as much as 8 billion barrels of recoverable light crude. When online in a few years it is expected to put Brazil among the world's "top 10" oil producers, between Nigeria and those of Venezuela.
In the US, aside from rumors that the big oil companies have been deliberately sitting on vast new reserves in Alaska for fear that the prices of recent years would plunge on over-supply, the US Geological Survey (USGS)recently issued a report that confirmed major new oil reserves in an area called the Bakken, which stretches across North Dakota, Montana and south-eastern Saskatchewan. The USGS estimates up to 3.65 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken.
These are just several confirmations of large new oil reserves to be exploited. Iraq, where the Anglo-American Big Four oil majors are salivating to get their hands on unexplored fields, is believed to hold oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia while much of the world has yet to be explored for oil. At prices above $60 a barrel huge new potentials become economic. The major problem faced by Big Oil is not finding replacement oil but keeping the lid on world oil finds in order to maintain present exorbitant prices. Here they have some help from Wall Street banks and the two major oil trade exchanges - Nymex and London-Atlanta's ICE and ICE Futures.
Then why do prices still rise?
There is growing evidence that the recent speculative bubble in oil, which has gone asymptotic since January, is about to pop. Late last month, in Dallas, Texas, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists held its annual conference, with major oil executives and geologists present. According to one participant, knowledgeable oil industry chief executives reached the consensus that "oil prices will likely soon drop dramatically and the long-term price increases will be in natural gas".
Just a few days earlier, Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank, had said that the current oil price bubble was coming to an end. Michael Waldron, the bank's chief oil strategist, was quoted in Britain's Daily Telegraph on April 24 saying, "Oil supply is outpacing demand growth. Inventories have been building since the beginning of the year."
In the US, stockpiles of oil climbed by almost 12 million barrels in April according to the May 7 EIA monthly report on inventory, up by nearly 33 million barrels since January. At the same time, MasterCard's May 7 US gasoline report showed that gas demand has fallen by 5.8%. And refiners are reducing their refining rates dramatically to adjust to the falling gasoline demand. They are now running at 85% of capacity, down from 89% a year ago, in a season when production is normally 95%. The refiners today are clearly trying to draw down gasoline inventories to bid gasoline prices up. "It's the economy, stupid," to paraphrase Bill Clinton's infamous 1992 election quip to daddy Bush. It's called economic recession.
The May 8 report from Oil Movements, a British company that tracks oil shipments worldwide, shows that oil in transit on the high seas is also quite strong. Almost every category of shipment is running higher than it was a year ago. The report notes that, "In the West, a big share of any oil stock building done this year has happened offshore, out of sight." Some industry insiders say the global oil industry from the activities and stocks of the Big Four to the true state of tanker and storage and liftings, is the most secretive industry in the world with the possible exception of the narcotics trade.
Goldman Sachs again in the middle
The oil price today, unlike 20 years ago, is determined behind closed doors in the trading rooms of giant financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank or UBS. The key exchange in the game is the London ICE Futures Exchange (formerly the International Petroleum Exchange). ICE Futures is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Atlanta Georgia International Commodities Exchange. ICE in Atlanta was founded in part by Goldman Sachs, which also happens to run the world's most widely used commodity price index, the GSCI, which is over-weighted to oil prices.
As I noted in my earlier article, ICE was the focus of a recent congressional investigation. It was named both in the Senate's Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations' June 27, 2006, Staff Report and in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce's hearing in December 2007, which looked into unregulated trading in energy futures.
Both studies concluded that the energy price climb to $128 and beyond is driven by billions of dollars' worth of oil and natural gas futures contracts being placed on the ICE. Through a convenient regulation exception granted by the George W Bush administration in January 2006, the ICE Futures trading of US energy futures is not regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), even though the ICE Futures US oil contracts are traded in ICE affiliates in the US. And at Enron's request, the CFTC exempted the over-the-counter oil futures trades in 2000.
So it is no surprise to see in a May 6 report from Reuters that Goldman Sachs announces oil could in fact be on the verge of another "super spike", possibly taking oil as high as $200 a barrel within the next six to 24 months. That headline, "$200 a barrel!" became the major news story on oil for the next two days. How many gullible lemmings followed behind with their money bets?
Arjun Murti, Goldman Sachs' energy strategist, blamed what he called "blistering" (sic) demand from China and the Middle East, combined with his assertion that the Middle East is nearing its maximum ability to produce more oil. "Peak oil" mythology again helps Wall Street. The degree of unfounded hype reminds one of the self-serving Wall Street hype in 1999-2000 around dot.com stocks or Enron.
In 2001, just before the dot.com crash in the NASDAQ, some Wall Street firms were pushing the sale to the gullible public of stocks that their companies were quietly dumping. Or they were pushing dubious stocks for companies where their affiliated banks had a financial interest. In short, as later came out in Congressional investigations, companies with a vested interest in a certain financial outcome used the media to line their pockets and that of their companies, leaving the public investor holding the bag.
It would be interesting for Congress to subpoena the records of the futures positions of Goldman Sachs and a handful of other major energy futures players to see if they are invested to gain from a further rise in oil to $200, not forgetting that 16 to one leverage with which a hedge fund or bank can buy oil futures.
We are hit with an endless series of plausible arguments for the high price of oil: a "terrorism risk premium", a "blistering" rise in demand of China and India; unrest in the Nigerian oil region; oil pipelines' blown up in Iraq; possible war with Iran ... And above all the hype about peak oil. Oil speculator T Boone Pickens has reportedly raked in a huge profit on oil futures and argues, conveniently, that the world is on the cusp of "peak oil". So does the Houston investment banker and friend of Vice President Dick Cheney, Matt Simmons.
As noted in the June 2006 US Senate report, The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices, "There's a few hedge fund managers out there who are masters at knowing how to exploit the peak oil theories and hot buttons of supply and demand, and by making bold predictions of shocking price advancements to come they only add more fuel to the bullish fire in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy."
Will a Democratic Congress act to change the carefully crafted opaque oil futures markets in an election year and risk bursting the bubble? On May 12, the House Energy and Commerce Committee stated it will look at this issue in June.
F William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (PlutoPress), and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (Global Research, available at www.globalresearch.ca). He may be reached at info@engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
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