I loved the book The Black Swan and I’ve just purchased The Bed of Procrustes so I’m attuned to news about Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This interview was found via Frank Wilson. Commenting on the Middle East he says,

…I recently read a few books on the French Revolution. I realized that the places that are vulnerable are not places where you have a starving lower class. You simply give them a little bit of bread and they are comfortable. The real danger is a rising middle class with thwarted expectations, like the upper middle class in Saudi Arabia. They are deprived of power and extremely resentful of the royal family because they encounter them daily, while the lower classes do not. The same is true of Bahrain. It does not have economic problems. It has an upper middle class that feels stifled by the regime. When you have resentment, it comes usually from the educated, upper middle class like the French Revolution.

He has apparently read a bit of Eric Hoffer.

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