Portal:Business/Selected quote/37

''"We close this chapter with a hint on the next discussion of resistance to randomness. Recall that Nero can be considered prosperous but not "very rich" by his day's standards. However, according to some strange accounting measure we will see in the next chapter, he is extremely rich on the average of lives he could have led-he takes so little risk in his trading career that there could have been very few disastrous outcomes. The fact that he did not experience John's success was the reason he did not suffer his downfall. He would be therefore wealthy according to this unusual (and probabilistic) method of accounting for wealth. Recall that Nero protects himself from the rare event. Had Nero had to relive his professional life a few million times, very few sample paths would be marred by bad luck-but, owning to his conservatism, very few as well would be affected by extreme good luck. That is, his life in stability would be similar to that an ecclesiastic clock repair-man. Naturally, we are discussing only his professional life, excluding his (sometimes volatile) private life.''

''Arguably, in expectation, a dentist is considerably richer than the rock musician who is driven in a pink Rolls Royce, the speculator who bids up the price of impressionist paintings, or the entrepreneur who collects private jets. For one cannot consider a profession without taking into account the average of the people who enter it, not the sample of those who have succeeded in it. We will examine the point later from the vantage point of the survivorship bias, but here, in Part I, we will look at it with respect to resistance to randomness."''


 * &mdash;Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, 2001

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