How Much Care Should You Take?

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We exercise the precaution principle to defend citizens against people risking sytemic ruin. I'm quite enauseated at the bea of these firms using lobyists and a category of of olecoloviist, duch scientists, unemployed scientists. And effectively you also have in a biological community some kind of er, what should i say, a kind ofdthat their interest aren't te stof you and i. So e began talking to gregg page of cargiland. Knowing some people a bon sano, they're very happy to be regulated. In fact, they're eager to be regulated because they feel that gives them boththe stamp of approval from for their customers

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile, Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a recent co-authored paper on the risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the use of the Precautionary Principle. Taleb contrasts harm with ruin and explains how the differences imply different rules of behavior when dealing with the risk of each. Taleb argues that when considering the riskiness of GMOs, the right understanding of statistics is more valuable than expertise in biology or genetics. The central issue that pervades the conversation is how to cope with a small non-negligible risk of catastrophe.