A New Year Wish  NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB   There is a pressing need to focus on imparting technical skills while respecting serial failure The wish is for economies to focus on technical skills, instead of formal higher education. Rich countries with highly educated populations became rich first, with education catching up.What these countries had was down-to-earth practical skills.Germany, ever so robust, has nearly half its youth undergoing some apprenticeship -learning real, useable, things. Beyond a point, education decreases entrepreneurial risk taking -the good kind of tinkering-style risk taking with small downside that has generated wealth since the Industrial Revolution. Just imagine what would have happened if Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Marc Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison stayed in school -and ended up as lawyers or consultants. We know that higher education increases the income of a family but it does not increase that of a country -label ...