Did you even read what he wrote? Where does it say anything about spending money? Taxpayer money?
Isn’t it assumed? Maybe I read it wrong, but isn’t he saying govt SHOULD take precaution? I mean govt effort or lack of efforts seems to be the core theme in this thread.
I meant nothing in this post about government at all, and I don't believe that this thread is or should be about politics. Nor do I believe that arguing about domestic politics has that been the motivation of most people here. Personally, I was thinking of Taleb's comments with respect to reducing health risk for individuals and with respect to portfolio management.
If there are those who would like to argue about the government response, and argue in a non-productive way as we have seen before on CoB&F, I would suggest this topic has become large enough to create a separate thread within the Politics section and potentially another thread within investment strategies to discuss portfolio management in the context of COVID-19.
Ultimately we are all here as investors, but let's not forget that some of us have already lost friends or family to this epidemic and more certainly will. I have many close friends on this board who I value immensely. Many of them are older and some are older with health issues that could put them right in the cross hairs of this virus. I worry for them and selfishly I fear for my loss were there something to happen to them.
I just found the original context of Nassim's comments, and I have to admit I don't fully understand the context, especially the disagreement:
I especially don't understand his spat with Tetlock:
Taleb's deragotory comments addressed at Tetlock seem unnecessary and I think engaging with a variety of viewpoints would be valuable in this situation. I think this board would similarly benefit from a variety of viewpoints and we could all be more welcoming by focusing on the ideas and not attacking individuals, but focusing on the specifics of an argument and responding with an argument that is even more well reasoned. From watching the interactions of several others on this board in the past couple of days I think the discussions would have been better if everyone could have refrained from the use of "you" and tried to refrain from making assumptions or at least questioned their assumptions about other people's motivations.
The Taleb statement I referred to was a statement he made as a response to Elon Musk's "panicking about the Coronavirus is dumb", where Taleb replied to Elon that "it is dumb to say that panicking about the Coronavirus is dumb".
According to Taleb, individual precaution does not scale to collective precaution and one must "panic" individually in order to avoid systemic problems. This is because the risk for an individual to catch the virus is low and while it seems irrational to panic, if you do not panic and react in a conservative manner, the virus will spread and become a severe source of risk.
In any case, I'm not panicking about the virus, because I'm in my 30's and in good health, so the chance for me from dying from this is close to 0. At the same time, I don't want my relatives (e.g. grand parents) to catch the virus, so Friday I cancelled a standup comedian his show in order to avoid a large crowd and have a smaller probability of catching the virus.
If everyone just continues leading their lives as if there was no virus (assuming there is no quarantine, etc), you can bet that 80% of the population will catch the virus eventually.
