When the stubborn minority wins

I have recently been reading Nassim Taleb's "Skin in the Game", one of the books from the "Incerto" series, and found the whole thing quite illuminating. Taleb combines a huge amount of historical knowledge with a razor-sharp tongue and a furious dismissal of academics who take themselves too seriously. The main point of the book is to make you aware of hidden asymmetries in everyday life in general and the financial world in particular. One of the things that stayed with me is the idea that a small, stubborn minority can end up calling the shots for everyone else. Consider a simple example. You are a group of four friends, one of whom is vegetarian. The meat eaters will happily eat a vegetarian meal, but the vegetarian will not touch meat. So when the four of you go out for lunch, you end up at the vegetarian place. One person in four decided where everybody ate, and nobody had to argue about it. The majority just followed. Taleb's point is that this scales. It is not just about four…