Foxes and Hedgehogs

Isaiah Berlin famously riffed on Archilocus’ epigram: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”[1] You can divide some public figures into foxes and hedgehogs, though sometimes you have to be generous: Malcolm Gladwell, for example, knows nothing about an astonishing variety of topics. Jacques Barzun appeared to have the last 500 years of literary and artistic history memorized. Tyler Cowen reviews fiction, nonfiction, movies, cheap food, fine dining, and not-big-on-TripAdvisor tourist destinations, in addition to economics. Paul Graham knows a lot about startups, silicon valley history, economic history, the university system — foxes, all of them.

Nassim Taleb knows one thing: normal distributions exist some of the time, but normal-looking distributions with fat tails are common in social phenomena. Tucker Carlson knows that the feud between Big Business and Big Government is about as real as a pro-wrestling storyline; Bhaskar Sunkara knows that, too. Xi Jinping knows that every successful Chinese dynasty is one big disaster away from oblivion (Chinese history being one of the social phenomena with enough datapoints that you can actually see the fat tails in the distribution). Every one of them a hedgehog.

And of course in investing, we have classic examples — or do we?

• Warren Buffett has informed opinions about consumer non-durables, specialty manufacturers, media companies, insurance, and banking. But you could also sum up Buffett’s view by saying that some businesses have such a durable…