The Agency Problem in Book Publishing and How it Applies to the Steem Blockchain | Skin in the Game

A Brief Idea On the Agency Problem in Book Publishing (and how this idea can apply to the Steem blockchain and dApps):

“Book reviews are judged according to how plausible and well written they are, never in how they map to the book (unless of course the author makes them accountable for misrepresentations).”

The agency problem as proposed by Nassim Taleb in Skin in the Game is relatively simple to understand:

When you have people who have the sole job to review or to rate or hand out rewards on a given subject. They are not actual practitioners - they do not have skin in the game.

Their only focus is on looking good to their peers (who are also in the business of talking about their field rather than actually doing anything within it).

Thus, in the book review business, the reviewers have an issue where they are judged based on how their review "looks" and is written comparative to other reviews.

What isn't relevant is how the review actually maps or relates to the book they're reviewing!

Thus, you get a NYT best seller list that actually doesn't mean a whole lot when it comes to the actual content of the book and what the review is about.

You can ask anyone who has gotten a book to the NYT best seller list: the game of doing that has little to do with the actual content of your book and more so to do with the politics that are going on behind the scenes.

How does this all relate to Steem, in my opinion?

“Now, almost two decades after the first installment of the Incerto, I have established ways to interact directly with you, the reader”

The medium between authors and readers has been shattered. Now we can connect with the authors directly and we can also connect with other readers directly.

We no longer need that centralized agency to middle man all of our transactions, reviews, best seller lists, etc.

The readers can post their reviews online and the authors can respond to them and also engage on social media.

That's actually how I learned about Skin in the Game and Nassim - I saw him on Twitter engaging in his infamous "twitter fights" about modern ideas and I thought, "man, if his tweets are this relevant, his book must be amazing!"

And so, I went out and got myself "Skin in the Game".

It's the same thing as the "uberization" of taxi companies - why are centralized taxi organizations needed when we can just open an app on our phone and book a "private taxi" right to our location?

The Steem blockchain is similarly providing a platform where any industry and centralized organization within it can be "uberized" - where the masses can interact directly with each other and with decentralized organizations that can help facilitate all of the transactions and communications.

Just imagine that book publishing and review lists can be a dApp on the Steem blockchain with SMTs that reward reviewers, readers and authors fairly and you can see where I'm going with this.

Now extrapolate that idea into any industry in the world... Now you see the power of SMTs and the future of the Steem blockchain. It's all just a matter of time.