Do you have Skin the Game?

Do you have Skin the Game?

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

– T. Sowell

Ever play Poker? If not, I strongly recommend that you do. What poker has taught me is manifold but today I want to focus on only one aspect of the game: the need for total commitment for any real effort to pay off. In case you didn’t know, for every hand in poker you must commit cash – hard cold cash – or else you don’t get to play. The logic is simple; if you are serious you show it via cash. But the real issue isn’t really isn’t money, it’s commitment. Poker is so emotionally intense because those playing it are so committed. It’s the intensity that makes you feel so alive when you play – as committed as the incredible athletes I was just watching at the Olympics Games in Italy.

At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every wonder why we are continuing to NOT having enough success to prevent the probably collapse of Nature and our civilization? Every wonder why, especially in Canada, we do most things “good enough”? Ever wondered why our homeless and addiction challenges keep on getting worse instead of better – in spite of our “best efforts”? Maybe its just a lack of TOTAL commitment. Perhaps we just don’t have ‘skin in the game’? Perhaps, as the quote at the top of the page says, because we make choices but don’t pay the price for being wrong, our so called “best efforts” fall mostly short.

What I see, through the lens of many years of teaching and also through the lens of the many elections I have been part of, is that we aren’t really serious about what we do because “doing our best” is thought of as good enough. Well, if we paid for our mistakes – and I mean personally – I am pretty sure we would make sure we didn’t fail so often. Here is a concrete example of what I mean. Imagine the capital city of a rich country vote for a mayor who puts in transit system that fails the engineering specification tests and then works with the city’s top administrator to hide important details like this from the city council…. and then leaves the city with a half functional transit system with no consequences! Imagine the top administrator resigns the day before the report comes out that goes into gruesome details on how the choices made by him and the mayor were clearly based on factors other than reliability and that this was all kept secret… and he got away with it with no consequences! Well, that really happened in a certain capital city that will not be named and makes the point that unless you have skin the game the chances of success are low because you lack personal commitment.

Its the same when it comes to our efforts to avert ecological collapse. We try our best to drive less. We buy carbon offsets as we fly to our ski vacations. We set the thermostat down a degree or two. We donate to the Sierra club. But we continue to vote for a main party instead of the other because they are not quite as evil as “the other guys” – in other words we vote for the lesser evil – which is still evil. [I went into depth on this problem in a previous essay] We compromise, we ring our hands when, after signing the Paris accord, our GHG emissions still increase. We say: it will get better… but it never does. Perhaps we just aren’t really committed? Perhaps we are not suffering the consequences of our half-hearted decisions? Perhaps we need to feel some real pain or real joy because of the choices we make? Perhaps ecological collapse in the form of drought or flood or fire or hurricane or Lyme;s disease from a tick needs to happen to us personally before we clue in that the destruction of the natural world is also hurting me? Perhaps we need to put some skin the game?

Here’s an insight from the book “Skin in the Game” by Nassim Taleb:

For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations. So what can you do? According to Nassim Taleb and T.Sowell really improving life needs this essential missing ingredient:

“Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game.

Without it, fools and crooks will benefit,

and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

Want to life, I mean REALLY live? Put some skin in the game.

No more “good enough”. Commit. Commit to no more business as usual. Commit to living simply so that others may simply live. Commit to no more choosing the lesser evil. Commit and act in ways that will allow those who live after us to not die because of shortsightedness, but thrive.