Really briefly, as I’m on a phone with a dying battery… it seems to me that there are two different conversations going on here.

Conversation 1: about what I read as Taleb’s claim that people resent the managerial/professional classes and admire the entrepreneurs because there isn’t a downside risk for the former.

Conversation 2: about whether at least some folks in the managerial/professional classes — economists, journalists, etc. — have screwed up incentives — there’s a downside risk, but the downside risk is avoided by successfully doing some stupid useless things rather than some useful things.

In both conversations, really my only claim is “entrepreneurs too” — in conversation 1, I claim that entrepreneurs too are often insulated from big downside risks after achieving sufficient level of success. (I’m tempted to say that getting fuck-you money in diversified safe investments is the entrepreneur’s equivalent of tenure or a NYTimes column.) And in the (more nascent) conversation 2, I claim that we reward entrepreneurs for unproductive, even harmful, activity much like we (arguendo) reward macroeconomists for the same. (And in the very abstract, for much the same reasons: because people “buy” stuff that’s bad for them.)

Anyway, more replies and elaborations hopefully to follow.