My early calls for the sort of antifragility expressed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his “Antifragile” of 2012.

In a statement delivered as an Executive Director at the World Bank on April 3, 2003 I wrote:

"A mixture of thousand solutions, many of them inadequate, may lead to a flexible world that can bend with the storms. A world obsessed with Best Practices may calcify its structure and break with any small wind." 

And in my book "Voice and Noise" of 2006 I said the following:

"Too well tuned?:  Martial arts legend Bruce Lee, whom many people regarded as immortal, died at the age of only 32 of a cerebral edema, or brain swelling, after taking some sort of aspirin. I have not the faintest idea whether that pill actually had anything to do with his death but I have frequently used (or misused) this sad death as an example of how an organism could be in such a highly tuned and perfect condition that it could not resist a small external shock. 

And I used this metaphor to explain why companies nowadays, pressured by the stock market’s expectations for the next quarterly results; the latest theories in corporate finance as to how squeeze out the last drop in results; and, perhaps, even some bit of creative accounting, might be so well-tuned (no little reserve fat left) that they would not be able to withstand any minor recession.

And here other two of my early warnings on fragility

In 1999 in a Op-Ed in I wrote: “The possible Big Bang that scares me the most is the one that could happen the day those genius bank regulators in Basel, playing Gods, manage to introduce a systemic error in the financial system, which will cause the collapse of our banks”

January 2003 in FT I wrote: “Everyone knows that, sooner or later, the ratings issued by the credit agencies are just a new breed of systemic error to be propagated at modern speeds”

November 2004 in FT I wrote: “Our bank supervisors in Basel are unwittingly controlling the capital flows in the world. How many Basel propositions will it take before they start realizing the damage they are doing, by favoring so much bank lending to the public sector?”

PS. Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "Antifragile" 2012, please stop referring to the last financial crisis as a “Black Swan”… it was a perfectly predictable manmade event.

Two brief comments on naming a new World Bank President

1. I would love for the world at large to be able to put forward their proposals for a new president at the World Bank but, having been an Executive Directors and having seen how so few of these EDs are truly allowed to speak out their own voice, I would also like to see that once they have received the list of candidates, they are isolated from any further interference from their capitals, and forced to reach a consensus between themselves as Executive Directors individually responsible for the Bank and the World.

2. If we are going to waste time just to haggle on who is going to be the next President of the World Bank, I would much rather have just about anyone named so that the Bank could go back and focus at the real issues. While an Executive Director of the World Bank (2002-2004), I calculated the cost of each of the EDs jointly debating an issue to cost around 80.000 US dollars per hour. Therefore I raised my voice quite noisily when the Board had to spend many hours discussing a salary increase of US$ 40.000 for our then president, Jim Wolfensohn, just so that he would earn as much as his counterpart at the IMF. Frankly, I do not know what I would have done with a Wolfowitz incident and now the follow up; I might have just gone berserk

The World Bank and IMF, should give the whole world, Mother Earth and the Global Rovers, more voice at its Executive Boards.

Many seem to opine that if only the votes and the composition of the Executive Boards of the World Bank (and the IMF) reflected better current economic size, then global imbalances had a better chance to disappear, like magic. It might not be as easy as that, and just for a starter why would GDP or the market share of the world trade be more important than market capitalizations for assigning voting power. Also if we are at it, why should we not then go for a full Monty on democratic reform and use population as the basis?

If and when a possible reshuffling of the current 24 Executive Directors should happen, I hope it will be to give representation, perhaps not to Civil Society, which is sort of intangible, but to that very tangible piece of land, water, and air that we all know as planet earth.

Although we proudly name ourselves the World Bank, the fact is that we are more of a “Pieces of the World Bank”, with 24 Executive Director representing parochial interests. As a consequence I sadly had to conclude in that the World itself, call it Mother Earth if you want, in these times of globalization, is in fact the Bank’s most underrepresented constituency.

This needs to be fixed, urgently, as we need to be able to stimulate a profoundly shared ownership for the long-term needs of our planet, if we want to survive as a truly civilized society, worthy of the name civilization. As I see it, adding a couple of truly independent seven-year-term Executive Directors, whose role would be to think about the world of our grandchildren, way beyond the 2015 of the Millennium Development Goals—could be what the World Bank most needs now.

And, while at it, we should perhaps also ask one of the current Directors to give up his Chair for a new constituency—call it, if you will, the Constituency of the International Rovers, by which I mean all those workers, skilled or unskilled, legal or illegal, who nowadays represent jointly one of the largest economies of the world. By the way, the first thing that the Global Rovers’ ED would need to do is to make clear the enormous difference that exists between an immigrant with a long-term plan to emigrate from motherland and forever assume a new nationality, and, on the other hand, a temporary worker who just wants to make a buck in order to help his family to a better life, and who wishes with all his heart and soul to return home as soon as possible. Forcing temporary workers to swear allegiances to foreign flags, just so that they can have the right to a better income, cleaning toilets, seems only like a new generation of artificial trade barriers.

Currently we are too stuck in the geography of the non-globalized world to be able to see what is truly happening around us. For instance, El Salvador has about 2 million of its people working abroad, more than a third of its total workforce and so if to the current GDP figures of El Salvador we add what these workers are earning, gross, well then perhaps El Salvador’s growth rate could actually be higher than China’s. And you tell me, why should we not do it this way? Is not an El Salvadoran still a real El Salvadoran just because he or she is working abroad? The internal emigration in China from west to east might take a Chinese from 50 to 150 dollars per month, but the El Salvadorans going south to north go from 120 to 1.200, and no one is heard complaining about an over or undervalued currency.

(Extract from a presentation of Voice and Noise at InfoShop on May 16, 2006)