Nassim Taleb is known mostly for his treatises on randomness and the impact of extreme but rare events — ”black swans”. However, throughout his work, and especially in his last book, one gets a hint of a political philosophy. He’s been quite careful to openly swear allegiance to no particular philosophy or ideology that is in currency today, always emphasizing that he is doing his own thing. However, he has recently clarified his position somewhat, and I think at this point it is safe to put him in the minarchist camp — that is, those who believe in a minimal state with a specifically enumerated but very limited set of responsibilities. Rather than endorsing the classical justifications for minarchism, however, Taleb comes at the subject from a probabilistic point of view.

Taleb’s popularity among libertarians has been somewhat greater than his general popularity for many years now. He has made many appearances on EconTalk, hosted by the very much libertarian Russ Roberts, and he has been interviewed at Reason. Yet he explicitly denies identifying as a libertarian. And there have been a few cases where he has staked out an opinion that clearly runs counter to straight libertarianism. For instance, after the shootings at Newtown, he came down in favor of strict gun control against assault rifles and semi-automatics. Moreover, though he did not come out and say that he favored banning GMO research, it’s clear from the arguments he did make that he at least leans that way.

Taking a recent set of tweets on the role of government in conjunction with his work and arguments he has made on social media, his position is now quite clear. The argument of the book Antifragile is that when you have a lower bound on bad outcomes, volatility can only be good for you, as the most extreme variation can only occur in the direction of good outcomes. As such, it should not come as a surprise that Taleb believes in a strong government role for bounding us against tail risks such as being conquered, having a rogue GMO wipe out all of agriculture, or permanently damaging the environment. Other than that, he believes that our policies should be as libertarian as possible. Bound the negative outcomes, unbound the positive ones; often the opposite of what governments actually do today.

One can be both pro-strong government for tail risks (wars, environment, safety net) & libertarian in the positive domain.[barbell] — Nassim N. Taleb (@nntaleb) November 13, 2013

At first glance this appeared even more extreme than your typical minarchism, as minarchists also believed in a role for the state in protecting property rights and policing violent crimes. Here, Taleb is not anarchist but rather something like an extreme federalist; such things should be left to local governments. Indeed, if Antifragile is any indication, it should be even more local than we are presently willing to consider; we should be more like the Swiss, atomized into a large number of tiny cantons run on the basis of direct democracy. This is another way of bounding negative outcomes — any extremely bad local policy can only have an impact on a very limited number of people.

The problem with relegating all policy to this decentralized arrangement, as Taleb sees it, is that human beings create tail risks that do not stop at the borders of policy-making entities. If Texas allows the development of a GMO that cross-breeds with our global food supply and renders all of it inedible, Texans will not be the only ones affected by it. If the New York government starts manufacturing nuclear bombs and selling them to countries that might use them to conquer other countries, New Yorkers would not be the only ones affected. And if the US were to entirely adopt a Switzerland-like structure but without a central government, and another country with a central government came along and conquered us, we would be right back where we started — or worse.

One problem I see with this is that so long as there are any countries that do not control tail risks, there are big holes through which we could all face terrible black swans. So by the logic of Taleb’s argument, it seems to me that the ideal world governance arrangement would have every country atomized like Switzerland, and then one big global government with a monopoly on military force that was responsible for blocking any tail risks anywhere. But he did not make that claim, so I will not attempt to defend or criticize it.

There are inherent problems when talking about ideal governance arrangements, of course, which may be why Taleb has mostly avoided it — reality constrains you both by how hard it is to get to where you want to be from where you are, and by what you would set in motion if you were even able to get to your ideal. Taleb rightly identifies tail risks as the greatest dangers to mankind and the planet, but aren’t there tail risks inherent to centralized government?

I asked something like this when discussing the extent of the risks inherent in social variation of all sorts. The most obvious risk to me is nuclear war. The possibility of nuclear war seems to me to be not only technological, but institutional — you need a couple of institutional bodies that can marshal the resources to produce enough warheads to annihilate life on Earth, and you need them to be susceptible to crossing that line. This is something which large, central governments seem more likely to engage in than the atomized, direct-democracy governments along Swiss lines. They can marshal more resources and require a lower threshold of consensus to act.

Moreover, even if we could start with central governments that did nothing but bound us against negative tail events, there would be nothing to bound the variation of those governments themselves. What we know suggests that volatility would not improve these institutions, but increase their bloat and overreach, and increase the chance that they would abandon or work at cross-purposes from the original goal of bounding tail risks.

Perhaps it is not fair to criticize Taleb’s point of view from an ideal governance perspective. He could simply be saying that, to the extent that we can influence our current policies within our current institutional arrangements, we should push for more control over tail risks and less control over everything else. If so, this seems more reasonable; and this would be a valuable modification of minarchist philosophy.