I love reading one-star reviews of Gladwell, Nassim Taleb and other airport literature, I only wish there was a review site for TED talks, the real live equivalent.
Skin in the game was anything but rigorous. I wrote a longer review of the book here [1] but the gist is this - "skin in the game" is a framework for responding to people's ideas by attacking the people directly. He provides little or no evidence while making extraordinary claims.
> He makes the extraordinary claim that “10 percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top 1 percent, and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top 10 percent”. You’d think he’d link to a source that proves this. He does not. He doesn’t even clarify if he’s talking about income or wealth. This isn’t an oversight, it’s deliberate. As he explains, “just a little bit of significant data is needed when one is right”. Of course Taleb is right, so he absolves himself of the need to prove his claims. He simply needs to state them for them to be true.
He actually derides Thomas Piketty for including data in Capital in the 21st Century!
I ran into his last book while waiting in an airport (of course) and opened a few pages at random to get a feel of it, maybe it was bad luck but any page I opened read just like a straight transcript of his Twitter feed...
