I am unsure how you went from admitting you were wrong about panicking to Bernie Sanders.
Though it was very obvious you WERE wrong and you should probably have your opinion pieces read by someone knowledgeable.
For example, downplaying the Coronavirus because of its low mortality rate. The Influenza epidemic of 1918 has a 2-3% mortality rate but was highly contagious... as well is the Coronavirus.
5
Turns out The Black Swan is actually dyed orange, and just like its color totally fake.
6
Well, y'all know that the most perfect thing ever for Don Trump to do now would be to pardon or at least commute the sentence of . . . Martin Shkreli, to let him work his underappreciated magick for a COVID-19 vaccine!
1
Wow, a talking head who made a big goof and is man enough to admit it!
Well played, sir!
Trump is an agent of chaos (or perhaps KAOS, from the old “Get Smart” TV show).
But Trump is not normal, and we need to get back to normal.
Trump is an American demagogue, in the tradition of Mussolini. The GOP (with the sole exception of Romney) has now become the cult of King Donald, promoting every one of Trump’s thousands of lies.
Trump’s extreme narcissism presents an imminent danger to America and to the world. The GOP caters to Trump’s every whim. Trump has betrayed our National Security by repeatedly and consistently aiding a foreign power, Russia. The GOP has become the Gang of Putin.
Trump sees enemies among immigrants, refugees, minorities, the Press, our government agencies, and our Allies. The GOP has endorsed all of this.
The survival of American Democracy is at stake. Vote Blue, no matter who!
4
Not being able to predict the future is not a form of chaos, it's part of the spice of life! This anal retentive need to make predictions is pathetic.
The stock market went down 3% on Monday. That's not "plummeting". That graph in the Times was misleading, and was meant to be. The vertical axis showing stock values started at 3200, not zero, just to make the drop look more dramatic.
The Times loves to create alarm. It’s their whole shtick.
In a couple of months, no one will be talking about the virus.
More than 100 people/day die in the U.S. in car accidents.
At least 10% of those are a result of distracted driving, people texting on their precious smartphone, instead of taking care of the business at hand.
Maybe we should be talking about that.
2
I was tempted to write to that prior column you wrote, basically saying you were an idiot who had no idea what they were talking about, but I didn't. I'm glad you figured it out yourself. Here's a mathematical theorem: take any spreading process (whether its a physical virus or a bad idea, like populism) in a network (basically a graph, with a set of vertices and edges). Regardless of the rate of spread, as the number of edges between vertices goes up (toward a complete graph), the more likely you have a pure exponential spread. For example, in a perfectly mixing world, the number of infected cases by Corona would follow roughly C(d)=2.6^ (d/7) (the 7 could possibly be as high as 14, there is a fair amount of uncertainty about the 7, and still some uncertainty about the 2.6). This means from the CA case, we would have 50% of the US population infected by July or August. However, its not a perfectly mixing world, and things slow down because there are very few edges between say Montana and NYC or CA and MS. Attempts to quarantine, shut down Hubei, etc bring the 2.6 down closer to 1 and that is the goal. The choice is basically to shut things down, and get to 1 or below (and have a recession) or to do nothing and still have a recession but a lot more death and misery.
2
Buddhism, people. Let's practice it.
2
i was pretty calm until Pence became the information gate keeper.... Time to start wearing my N95 mask....
25
I wish I didn't know what was likely to happen next but since birth I could pretty well understand the scenarios and what was likely to happen.
I wasn't the only one who understood technology and knew history. We saw this coming when America chose a Hollywood pitchman over a brave, ethical and understanding scientist and engineer. Some of us actually turned down the thermostat and bought ourselves warm sweaters.
People chose not to listen and now we are led by a lemming. Some of us know the cliff is not that far ahead and even as we try to turn back , chances are we will be run over by the stampede.
4
The fact you try everyday to live your life the same you'd usually do but also worrying about Covid-19 is terrifying. This needs to be stopped. I have a lot of anxiety about this and really just hope it will be contained soon.
Things will only get crazier and more unpredictable. The craziness will increase exponentially. Eventually, more crazy stuff will happen in ten years than what's happened in the past 100, and after that, more will happen in innovation in 1 year than what's happened in the past 1,000 years. If we play it out, down the line, due to complexity and exponential growth, more craziness (technological breakthroughs, culture shifts, unforeseen events, etc.) will happen in one day than all of human history. It might sound strange, but I don't think it's all that radical. I'm really just repeating what a lot of other great thinkers have said.
"Nothing is inevitable provided we are prepared to pay attention."
- Marshall McLuhan
15
No one can predict the future. That's a safe statement.
The caronavirus is 20 times more lethal than the flu virus. That's also a safe statement, and both are the results of 20/20 hindsight.
But, whatever happened to our Surgeon General, "the nation's #1 health official"? No one could have predicted that position's disappearance.
4
"...and the Trump administration’s response to it is bound to be bumbling and perhaps extremely scary." What, exactly, in the President's track record makes you say this? You've been taken in by the fake news and all the liberal scare stories. The vast majority of Trump polices have been targeted and effective in solving the problems they're designed to solve, from taxes to the economy to trade and immigration and other policy issues. The U.S. will come through the COVID-19 scare far better than nearly all other countries. Our system is better designed, better funded and better run that nearly all others. Just because its run by some one you don't like doesn't mean it can't work very well. Sounds almost like wishful thinking to me.
1
@Chas Smith
These are facts not fake news:
Trump has told over 16,000 lies, made racist statements, is a misogynist, a xenophobe, used campaign funds to pay off Playmates and porn stars who he’s had affairs with, says groping women is fine, has had many of his colleagues and staff convicted of crimes, has a foreign government (Ukraine) find dirt on his political rival and on tape in front of the press asked China to do the same, doesn’t believe Russia meddled in the 2016 election and doesn’t believe they will do it in 2020, locks up immigrant families in detention facilities, thinks coal is coming back, loosens environmental protection laws, pulled American forces out of Syria so Turkey and can bomb and kill Kurds who had helped those American forces fight ISIS, has not done anything about healthcare except to try to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, distrusts and admonishes our NATO allies but cozies up to dictators and authoritarian leaders, has made fun of American war heroes more than once, made fun of a disabled journalist, he said he doesn’t read, can’t string a coherent sentence together, thrives on chaos, when he obviously knows someone very well he says he doesn’t know them, won't release his tax returns, has his children work for the government, enriches his resort hotel business with tax payer dollars, gave tax cuts to the rich, ballooned the deficit to trillions with his tax cuts, starts trade wars with our allies, and not enough space to add more to this list.
3
@Chas Smith " The U.S. will come through the COVID-19 scare far better than nearly all other countries. " Now THAT'S "wishful thinking", especially after this "administration" CUT the CDC's funding by 10%, and ELIMINATED our pandemic response team.
3
It's not quite chaos itself that's the problem: I'd be elated to stumble into a surprise party thrown for me where cookies and someone I'd had an unspoken crush on awaited my presence.
No, the REAL problem is that (a) we have not half a clue what'll happen next, but (b) DO know that whatever's coming will make the last nadir we'd hit look like a shallow rose-lined pond, because there's so many vile people pulling our strings.
1
In the 1910s and 1940s the world was plunged in wars which killed 10s of millions. The Spanish flu killed 10s of millions in 1918/1919.
Is today really anymore chaotic or dangerous? In a lot of respects we are much better off even with all of uncertainty.
1
It is possible that Bernie Sanders could win the Democratic nomination and go on to win enough battleground states to defeat Donald Trump. But when possible events start to seem likely, you may want to check yourself for magical thinking.
Other than Trump who is a stable genius, who can claim to know the future? I can tell this much; removing Trump will cost a lot of money, and the only candidate that Bloomberg probably won't bankroll is Bernie Sanders.
2
Something to remember as the world, and its problems, become more complex- a fundamental maxim in conflict resolution - an organization cannot solve a problem more complex than the organization’s structure.
The two-party system has given us several decades of predictability, but with the 2016 entrance of a successful Republican outsider (and phony populist) and now an outsider (and genuine populist) is dominating the Democratic Party, predictability has gone out the door.
What resulted is a punditry, intellectually dull from decades of complacency and predictability, totally coming unhinged in this era of uncertainty. Chris Matthews martyring himself in Central Park, and the rest of the pundits using "electability" as a code word for "Sanders will take away our privilege".
1
This is timely and helpful. I'm not sure if chaos is ever-expanding or if we're just more exposed to it, thanks to the internet and the speed of global news. Our history is full of chaotic and unpredictable events that had grave consequences and some events have dramatically changed societies, economies and the government.
The biggest shift that we have to face is the complete lack of sustainability of our current economy. We're extracting, manufacturing and consuming our way to a ruined planet and we must take a hard look at what we're willing to live without if we want our children and grandchildren to have a decent existence. We've been overborrowing from mother nature and we have to pay this back with interest. Or we could just punt it, along with our ballooning national debt, to the younger generations.
Because of this virus, we need to consider the value of some things we hold dear. These include the ability to travel anywhere and the ability to get there quickly on an airplane.
It also exposes the risks of spreading supply chains all around the world. That's what's got the stock market freaked out.
It also exposes several weaknesses peculiar to the American economy. People on the economic margins have no way to be quarantined. They will tough it out and go to work because they have to; otherwise they could lose their jobs, and their housing. They will spread it to others in their households because they live crowded closely. Heck, if me or my wife catch it, I have no idea how to keep us from infecting each other, and we are not poor or housing insecure. If I shared an apartment with 4 other people, all of them living paycheck to paycheck with no sick leave, there would be no way.
Finally, it might force us to do something that I have tried to do for years. When you catch a cold, you should be able to cancel all your plans for 10 days without being stuck paying for reservations you can't use, and without losing your job, zeroing out your sick leave days, or even angering your friends with whom you have plans.
1
Good column. Personally, I remain relatively unconcerned about Covid 19 and, until we get a real, complete picture of what its fatality rates are, I intend to remain militantly unconcerned. The rest of your column is also instructive. I agree that Sanders is looking (to me) increasingly electable, but I also am not American and I am well aware that everything he is proposing is commonplace in much of the rest of the world. There is nothing radical about it at all and the oddity is more than Americans are not tearing down the walls out of anger that they are living in a society that is prepared to let sick people go bankrupt as they struggle with illness or young people go into crippling debt as they try to better themselves through education. That complacency in the face of grave injustice is what is really radical!
4
If the pundit class has shown more humility in 2016, we likely would not be suffering the chaos of the Trump presidency.
2
"No one wants a wishy-washy pundit." And this, my friends, is the problem with punditry: it conflicts with intellectual honesty and, as a result, the analysis suffers.
3
As my guru said, "It's really hard to make predictions, especially about the future,"
4
You're bound to be right about at least one thing.
Of course, predicting the Trump administration’s response to the crises to be bumbling and scary is like forecasting fish to swim.
2
yeah, this is kind of my feeling. It's like world war 1, where the conventional wisdom about war was completely upended due to technological changes, but the thinking of the generals had not caught up.
Though I cannot tell if this is because black swan events are increasing, or because the media landscape is so out of touch with people's daily lives and lived experience. It's like you guys are always playing catch up to everyone else, like things are happening quickly in places outside of y'alls view which make the trends obvious, and then you suddenly notice only after the train gets moving.
but maybe what has been happening for so long is that the media establishment has had it's own Dunning Kruger effect, and now you all are staring into the abyss of your own ignorance. Maybe all these models and tools y'all have been using to try to predict the future are mostly based in about a half century of data from a very particular period of human history with particular conditions, and as these conditions have changed these models have become less relevant.
Either way, it really seems like the conventional wisdom is broken, the wheel of the ship is spinning, and nobody actually seems to have any idea about what will happen next.
My dear, black swan events are not any more likely today than they were yesterday or in the last century. They remain black swans. The analogy has taken hold and turned into a veil to hide our hubris and lack of good information. Is Covid19 a black swan? No. There have been prior cases of animals hosting new viruses that then infect people. HIV started in monkeys. We can't get monkey diseases, but chimps ate monkeys and people ate chimps then patient zero comes to America.
In other words, Covid19 will likely be with us for years. We'll get it under control eventually. HIV was limited by the fact we're not all that promiscuous. But we all breath freely and congregate most famously many times / day.
Don't act like you can't foresee the future any longer because you don't understand the complications of the world. You never understood the real complications of the world and that never slowed you down before. I don't mean that derisively, but mathematically. Think of all there is to know about how things work well enough to predict the future.
You have license to be creative, not accurate.
AI has been used with great success to model and target click bait based on collective history of clicking behavior across a large population.
Let's now turn AI onto Covid19 and see what kind of models we can churn with a few thousand racks of processors and petabytes of data.
"You Don’t Know What Will Happen Next"
I know one thing for certain: if Trump is reelected, America will lose what remains of our constitutional democracy.
2
Admitting when you're wrong is good. Saying you're wrong only because some combination of "black swan" events occurred, is not. The escalation of this virus is foreseeable. Don't have to be a doctor, or a scientist, or a journalist to know that.
3
“What was the 2008 financial crisis if not an out-of-the-blue event that stymied most prognosticators?”
Really?
How about, it was:
a) An event that was foreseen by numerous knowledgable, experienced, responsible people in the financial services industry who tried to warn their bosses and were punished for their prudence and nonconformity.
b) An event for which there was at least one red flag, in the form of the Long Term Capital Management debacle, which gravely disrupted the banking system and world markets when LTCM’s brazenly cavalier, bizarrely risky bets came crashing down around it.
c) An event that was the logical culmination of years of ill-advised deregulation of the banking and financial services industries, a laxity that prompted warnings from more of those pesky knowledgable, experienced, responsible people, some of whom were quite prominent and highly visible.
d) All of the above.
Mark Schnapper
Westport, Connecticut
3
@Mark Schnapper Agreed. Glass-Steagal never had a chance.
1
The thing about the virus, if you live in China, is that is has drastically changed our day to day lives in every way. When and if that happens in America, it will be interesting, to say the least.
Let's hope Trump doesn't shut down the election in November under the guise of preventing the virus from spreading among crowds of voters. His press conference in response to the crisis this evening was full of wishful thinking, minimizing and outright distortion. He's already blaming the Democrats for driving the stock market down for allegedly hyping the threat. He appointed the V.P. as the Virus Czar. How long before we here from the preacher wing of the Trump Party that this is a form of divine punishment for the sins of communism (because it started in China) and the Democrats whom Trump cavalierly and frequently refer to as evil. I think there's more than on Black Swan here. Feels more like the Hitchcock movie, "The Birds".
2
So fantastic to read some humility and wisdom! Personally, I'm still conflicted about the coronavirus' danger. I don't trust the CDC because they're Trump's sycophants now. Did you notice how, at the press conference, they had to frame almost everything they said as a compliment to the president? How can we believe anything they tell us about COVID-19 when they're telling us pollution isn't bad for you? And what sort of thankfulness can I possibly have for a government that wants to make me pay out of pocket to protect myself? Which they didn't even tell us how to do… Until non-CDC scientific organizations start to come to consensus, I'll be ignoring most of what the CDC says. I know that's risky, but what choice do I have? They'll tell us it's all okay to help Trump's ego or that it's all horrible to keep us in line.
1
@Andrew Roberts ' they had to frame almost everything they said as a compliment to the president? "
Indeed, these public briefings have a pronounced russian tone and behavior. That shouldn't surprise us tovarichi.
Okay, I'll admit it. I don't know what's going to happen. But I have no confidence in Fair Weather Donald to effectively deal with a crisis from out of the blue like a pandemic. That's not exactly his strong suit.
So far Trump's response is jawbone up the stock market, blame "do nothing Democrats," and castigate the news media for its reporting.
Must I admit to something I've known, and never pretended to, my entire adult life?
Re: " What was the 2008 financial crisis if not an out-of-the-blue event that stymied most prognosticators?"
It was an easily foreseeable and foreseen outcome. Foreseen by myself, and others. Brooksley Born warned against the unregulated derivative market, back in the mid 1990's. She was overruled by Larry Summers: Not because he disagreed, but because he knew how vulnerable the system *already* *was*. And argued to dig a deeper hole, rather than publicly admit how deep the hole was, and to stop digging. Read "13 Bankers". Watch Frontline video, "The Warning". The mainstream news pooh-poohed, attacked, and dismissed anyone who brought it up, like good lap dogs of our corrupt, big bank controlled "mainstream consensus". Fake news indeed. Trump didn't destroy the credibility of our mainstream press - they did that to themselves. Trump merely exploited it.
In addition, it wasnt *just* about the "financial crisis". It was about an economy-driving housing bubble, which, when it popped, would obviously devastate the economy. Dean Baker predicted it, based on data, as did many non-groupthink, fact based analysts. During the period of 2001 through 2008, the actual *number* of US manufacturing jobs dropped, replaced by temporary, housing bubble related jobs, set to evaporate when the bubble popped. For years prior to that, the percentage of US manufacturing jobs had been declining, but the drop in actual number of manufacturing jobs, was unprecedented.
1
Trump is not aggressively going after the Coronavirus because this will be his way of stopping the election. If any of the election biards had foresight they would start implementing mail in ballots all across the country right now!
Mary
I didn't need the virus to scare me into thinking that trouble
was heading our way.
I smelled it when it was coming down the escalator.
3
I'm not Methuselah, but I've been around long enough to know that periods of perceived chaos always happen. Even moments of fascism that threaten us now happen, then are defeated.
But one certainty exists now which adds immensely to the feeling of chaos and which never happened before in human history: the total destruction of nature is upon us.
Saving the natural world that still exists, and restoring much of what's been lost, is the one holy crusade we must all undertake immediately to save ourselves and return to some aspect of normalcy.
But that will require a revolution against today's capitalism and consumption. More chaos before it ends! This must happen; there is no choice.
1
When Trump was elected I thought things were going to go badly, but I didn’t fathom a major virus as part of my fears. Great, now we all get to be sick too with the least apt uncle in charge of our care.
But as the song says ‘the future is not ours to see.’
You undercut your own position, Farhad Manjoo. To you, Sanders is looking increasingly electable.
To me, Elizabeth Warren has always looked as if she should be seen as the more electable of the Sanders-Warren dyad. But I learned from reading comments in the Times about the debate that at least in my USA even many women gang up against a female candidate joining forces with, as expected, all too many men.
Warren has thought out her proposals far more carefully than has Sanders, and her academic-intellectual record is much deeper than Sander's-
But here in the Times and in Comment and Debate Land being a woman is strike 1 against her.
As an antidote, I recommend that anyone who reads this comment see if the New York Review of Books OnLine will let them read this superb essay, even if they are not a subscriber, as I am.
Warren In The Trap
by
Caroline Fraser, Pulitzer Prize winner - Biography
NYRB March 12, 2020
There you can learn about the real Elizabeth Warren, not the one we are given by her competitors
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
Thank you so much.
I am so tired of people telling us who will or will not win the primaries and then the election.
I am so tired of people telling us about every death that occurs from the virus. I am tired of people trying to tell us what they know about the virus and then what they don't know.
At this time there are only three things that one can predict.
Someday we will all die,
Global warming will see that it happens sooner than later.
And at least some of the people in the United States will have to pay their taxes.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate." (Carl Jung)
3
What concerns me with Farhad's thesis is that it tacks uncomfortably close to the right wing's attacks on objective truth. The difference is that Farhad does not have a pernicious agenda, Fox News does.
1
I think we can confidently predict that the Trump administration response to Covid-19 will be inept. And that’s a best case scenario.
“But I worry that unwarranted certainty, and an under-appreciation of the unknown, might be our collective downfall, because it blinds us to a new dynamic governing humanity: The world is getting more complicated, and therefore less predictable.”
But, one thing is completely predictable, Trump will try and save his own skin by behaving exactly as described above. To have a president with zero credibility and zero ability to tell the truth in such a time as this is one of the worst Black Swans imaginable.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... the future is uncertain and the end is always near... the only certainties are death and taxes... being wrong is part of the human condition... predictions are hard, especially about the future... the future is electric and dangerous... everything will be fine as long as they don't put fruit in our beer... etc, etc.
Interesting, isn't it, how Mother Earth shakes us up? Just when we think we have figured her out. Love it.
Thank you for acknowledging your error. It is a characteristic of objectivity often lacking almost everywhere, including the opinion pages.
I hope your column sets a good and contagious example.
"A projection of certainty is often a crucial part of commentary; nobody wants to listen to a wishy-washy pundit"
Heck, it is not limited to punditry. Donald Trump made a lifelong career out of projecting confidence and knowledge about everything despite his utter ignorance about nearly everything.
Just this week he repeated that Covid-19 was under control in the U.S. and that it would be over by April without ever becoming a pandemic - things that even the most informed medical professionals can't ascertain, and the president who doesn't even know how to spell coronavirus (see his tweet) thinks he knows all he needs to know about it.
On politics, almost all of the heavy weight pundits have been wrong most of the time when it comes to the presidency. That didn't stop them from earning nice lifelong salaries, making paid speeches before convention groups, writing books and starting all over again to be wrong a few years later. Indeed, for this and many other reasons I concluded that what it means to be a professional is...never having to say you're sorry. Just roll on.
The political commentators largely relied on what had happened in the past, not what was happening right now. Population shifts, industrial rust out zones, drug epidemics, these were all hard to factor into any analysis.
On covid-19, who knew there were so many people from Wuhan, China traveling to Italy? To Iran? To America? Who among us had even heard of Wuhan?
Commentary is the business of adding up what you know, or think you know, and projecting the vectors in your imagination. I little hole appears in the boat. Do you run around screaming, "The ship is sinking!" or do you say, "Don't worry"?
Speculating about covid-19 is especially difficult because actual proven, scientific knowledge is emerging in bits and pieces. We don't know what we don't know, too. Calm concern is in order. There would be time to panic later.
1
"Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got til it's gone..." sang Joni Mitchell. We used to have a leader, once upon a time. Now we have a reality-show narcissist making fools of all of us in his news conference while an epidemic grows and our stocks shrink. It's like having an alcoholic father, where you never know what you'll get beyond disappointment and chaos, there is no solid ground. But we don't get to choose our parents, whereas we actually do get to elect our leaders.
Life can be chaotic and tragic, but we can vote out the Clown Prince. Vote blue no matter who.
I know this will sound goofy, but it's the internet. We all now have too much information, much of it 'spun' for various reasons and of doubtful quality, we don't know how to correctly evaluate it, we can't put it in perspective. For instance, the idea that this new virus is just a severe flu, that flu causes hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide every year, so this one, while bad, is not unprecedented, take sensible precautions, etc. Thanks to internet we see it as a world crisis that threatens to bring down the whole economy. Or Mr. Sanders. In the days before internet Democratic Party officials, seeing the danger he posed to their election chances, would have quietly sidelined him through subtle campaign rule changes and that would have been that. Now, thanks to unlimited, totally unregulated information flow, we run the risk of having an unstoppable crypto-commie running for president who could blight Democratic chances of retaking the White House and might even lose them the H of R. Weren't we happier when we knew less?
William Goldman wasn't wrong.
This looks like an attempt to use your misjudgment of the corona virus to justify your support of Bernie Sanders. I would say you were just wrong, but understandably so. That is a bad base from which to prognosticate about Sanders. “Gosh, look how wrong I was after being so reasonable, so I guess all of the reasonable worry about a Sanders candidacy could also be wrong.” If you want to see a good discussion of Democratic Party strategy and a reasonable prognostication about a Sanders candidacy, go to FiveThirtyEight.com and listen to Galen Druke interview James Clyburn about the Democratic primary and the 2020 general election.
1
Yes I do.
Democrats will lose and Trump will win.
I appreciate the humility behind this column. A lot of people refuse to admit they've been wrong so this is refreshing.
I'll tell you one thing. Having a stable government is a guard against black swans. We have always had them - plagues, famines, terrible, destructive wars; pogroms; Holocausts.
When Steve Bannon came on the scene declaring he and Trump intended to "deconstruct the administrative state" I shuddered. This was a declaration of war on peace, expertise, stability, law - the internal infrastructure that keeps a country secure no matter what happens.
I study history, culture, art. One of the oldest, most accomplished and fascinating countries in the world, China, had a meritocratic bureaucracy that transcended emperors, bridged civil wars and the rise and fall of dynasties - a core of expertise - a "deep state" of language, knowledge, science, art, finance - and China is still with us despite terrible wars, famines, revolutions, catastrophes, invasions.
We've only been around since 1776 C.E. That's a relatively long time for a democratic republic with its built-in chaos and constantly shifting dynamic, especially one as multicultural and diverse as ours. But it's nothing compared to the vast sweep of human history - the thousands of years Egypt ruled; Rome; China, even the great American empires to our south, that were finally brought down by the conquistadors and their priests.
Trump is taking us down in less than four years. We shouldn't allow it.
Regarding pundits and predictions, the most dangerous folks on earth are those that are right 90% of the time, but believe it’s 100%.
To quote Jim Morrison & The Doors..."the future's uncertain and the end is always near." Let it Roll!!
1
“In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery.” — Tom Robbins,
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
1
Maybe basing what you are going to do about the spread of a virus off an opinion columnist is the bad idea.
Farhad doesn’t know viruses, let alone this one, isn’t an epidemiologist who has studied their spread, let alone coved-19.
Maybe, just maybe, our experts, who inevitably will talk with less surety and hubris, probably will hedge their expectations with probability. And yes, may get it wrong, but probably not as wrong as Farhad or VP Pence who is now in charge for America.
Maybe If Mr Manjoo spent more time on amplifying voices that should be heard, instead of thinking it is his that matters always- and here his doesn’t. He is ignorant as most of us are.
Maybe we’d handle this, and a lot more, better. Experts can often get it wrong too, but generally will be more on target than Mr Manjoo’s ignorance.
But instead we get Farhad online shopping for face masks that probably won’t help him, but will put a scarcity on the availability for those it would. Worse than ineffective commentary.
We all are scared to a point, and part of it is because we don’t have the knowledge to understand what is going on, nor the power to in any great sense do anything about it personally. Taking a backseat to those who are better positioned to handle this, is probably the right move.
Of course not, because there's a horse loose in the hospital.
1
Read "Patron Saint of Plagues" by Barth Anderson
Nominating Sanders does not seem at all strange, because if we can stop being ostriches, get our heads out of the sand, and look around the world, nothing he says is radical.
What is strange is NYT and other news outlets confidently stating in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had an 88% chance of beating Donald Trump. That taught us everything we need to know about punditry. This article is superfluous.
1
Also, what’s new about not being able to predict the future? Perhaps only that you, as a millennial, seem to think you are entitled to it.
You were wrong about the coronavirus because, far too frequently, you opine in subject matters you know little to nothing about. This piece is yet another example.
Sanders, if unfortunately nominated, will never win the Presidency. And given the numerous & more informed writing on the philosophy/physics of chaos theory that is available, your attempt is laughable.
1
"Of course, I could be wrong. We all could be."
But hey, on the other hand, I squeezed another column out of it.
2
Just an aside, the current coronavirus seems to have a mortality rate barely higher than seasonal flu.
The CDC estimated that in the somewhat severe winter 2017-2018 flu season, over 60,000 Americans died of flu or its complications.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
@Dave Hitchins Not so. The current estimates of flu mortality are .1%, but the caronavirus is at 2%.
That's 20 times more fatal.
The obvious (!) problem with these preliminary statistics is the difficulty in measuring a rising tide of infections/deaths. We have solid historic flu data, but only a limited amount of caronavirus data, but the incressed mortality rate is obvious, even with this situation.
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Pundits, like politicians need to learn when to leave predictions and reactions to the experts. Yes, the humble experts (at the CDC and others trained in epidemiology) know they aren't perfect and it is sometime frustrating when they don't give us answers with absolute certainty. But you pundits and politicians need to realize that is not a sign of weakness—that is how science and statistics works.
So please, don't pretend we know nothing (like this column) don't pretend you know everything (like your last column)— just refer us to experts and stop printing opinions about topics that you are wholly unqualified to speak about!
3 lessons we can learn from Fredrick Hegel. 1 - important parts of ourselves could be found in history. During Hegel’s time, a standard European way at looking at the past was to consider it as primitive and to feel proud how much progress has been made to get to the modern age. Hegel argued every era could be looked at as a depository of certain kinds of wisdom. This means we need to go back in time to rescue things which have gone missing. For example, we might need to mine the history of ancient Greece to fully grasp the idea what community can be - today, we can learn from the successful application of Epicurean philosophy which enable & promote happiness in democratic societies despite communism being a corrupt unsuccessful attempt at Epicureanism. We have to rescue from the past ideas to compensate for the blind spots of the present since progress is never linear. 2 - learn from ideas you dislike. We should listen carefully to our intellectual enemies since bits of the truth are always getting scattered to unappealing and peculiar places & we must put in the work to make sense of them. For example, nationalism has had many terrible manifestations (KKK). Why do you think that is? Could it be the need for people to feel proud from where they come from and anchor their identity beyond the ego? 3 - Progress is messy. We make progress by going from one extreme to another as we seek to compensate for previous mistakes. Hegel named this three move process “The Dialectic”.
Panicking is for wealthy, erudite readers of the NYT who faint at the idea their offspring may not get full ride to Princeton due to missing a day of school.
Panic is a luxury.
How refreshing of Mr. Manjoo to admit his mistake.
One of the major problems with the pundits in the mainstream media, including the Times, is that they run the entire gamut of political views from A to B. (To paraphrase Dorothy Parker)
There is, for example, no regular columnist at the newspaper progressive enough to understand the wide appeal of Senator Bernie Sanders to millions of Americans and the passion so many feel for the fair and compassionate society he is proposing.
This myopic vision leads to many errors. Check out the Times' columnists' insistent predictions during the Presidential election of 2016, particularly the excoriations against the Senator from Vermont and the paeans of praise for Clinton and her "electability."
Sadly, it is a rare pundit who admits s/he was wrong. Instead they simply repeat their mistakes year after year. Witness the Times columnist.
Television is even worse in that CNN, MSNBC and the three major networks keep inviting people (pundits, politicians and military leaders) who have been totally wrong on the issues of the day (from the Iraq war to the crash of 2008 etc. etc.) for decades. Yet news anchors question them as though they are experts and listen respectfully to their bloviating.
Fox "News" is not the only powerful media source of misinformation.
Farhad: "And whether we’re talking about the election, the economy, or most any other corner of humanity, we in the pundit class would do well more often to strike a note of humility in the face of the expanding unknown. We ought to add a disclaimer to everything we say: “I could be wrong! We all could be wrong!” "
Farhad, you'll never got a slot in cable news with that attitude.
I think you got it about right this time.
“The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”
(Bertrand Russell, The problems of philosophy, 1912)
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there are no experts in next.
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Ridiculous. The rapid spread of Covid-19 was in no way a "black swan" event. A few weeks ago it was clear that the virus was quite dangerous, Experts in the field were still collecting data but it was clear that it was airborne, human-to-human transmissible, infections with a Ro of over 2 and lethal to some percentage of patients (at that point both numerator and denominator were unknown making lethality hard to calculate. Everyone in the public health community understood the risk even in the face of incomplete data, and there was little reassurance that (pretty lucky) responses to SARS and MERS wouldn't portend success in dealing with Covid. There was no reason for panic for sure, but the Polyanna tone of your last column was simply naive. Like much NYT reporting of real dangers (Trump... etc) the paper's attempt to be cool-handed and impartial is making the paper seem blasé in the face of real dangers. These aren't black swan events: they are eminently predictable.
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"We know, in the end, that a sense of security is always false." - Anthony Lane
@Todd "There is no security." Wolfgar.
As Yogi Berra said “It’s hard to make predictions........especially about the future”.
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Is it possible that the main issue with your "Corona Column" was that, although obviously highly intelligent and clearly able to synthesize information from a wide variety of fields, you nevertheless lack medical experience and expertise?
And thus like so many right now you simply "Didn't know what you were talking about"
No offense: it puts you in good company on this one.
Well you've more than made up for your coronavirus minimization with this current column. Especially with a black swan swanning around the oval office...
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People used to post this all the time at the school where I taught history and speak of it in hushed tones of reverence:
"Never Doubt That a Small Group of Thoughtful, Committed Citizens Can Change the World; Indeed, It’s the Only Thing That Ever Has." M Mead
I took one look at it and thought it was a bunch of bologna. What about viruses? They certainly change the world! Meteors? Just ask the dinosaurs! Solar flares? Goodbye electrical grid! The list goes on!
I far prefer John Lennon's "“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” Security is an illusion, unless we are secure in a dynamic world. Cheers!
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There's no need for an embarrassed, defensive article like this. You made a very reasonable point with the info that was available at the time.
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'Long-dormant bacteria and viruses, trapped in ice and permafrost for centuries, are reviving as Earth's climate warms...'
By Jasmin Fox-Skelly 4 May 2017 (BBC Earth)
Go ahead, drill that oil, and if a few glaciers melt....
You want to talk about chaos, well, as far as I'm concerned Polls are magical thinking. And we are basing our entire democracy on something about as reliable as reading tea lives or using holy chickens as agents of prophecy.
I keep seeing polls about how so-and-so "will beat Donald Trump." I don't understand why we still trust polls.
I live in Iowa and kept seeing polls about how Joe Biden was the front runner. And then caucus time and he did dismally -- he didn't even qualify in my polling station.
Then there was the whole Hillary Clinton debacle in 2016 where people were giving her overwhelming odds to win against Trump.
Your original thought was right. There is no reason to panic about Covid-19. It has spread, true, but not at some alarming rate. Based on the data we have, it does not appear to be especially lethal. It does perhaps have a higher mortality rate than the seasonal flu, but the seasonal flu will still kill far more people worldwide every year than Covid-19 will. We don't panic about that because we have factored the risk into our accepted thinking (or more likely, most are ignorant of the actual numbers that the seasonal flu kills).
The stock market downturn actually supports your original conclusion: the risk of over reaction is far worse than the virus itself. That you have decided to curtail vacation plans or buy face masks doesn't speak to an increased risk, it just means that you are giving into the fear induced by global overreaction.
People should take care by washing their hands, practicing good hygiene, and staying home when sick. But that is true every year. But people should also buckle up when driving, not drink and drive, lock up their guns when not in use, and take care getting in and out of the shower. The risks from those activities are far greater than Covid-19.
Now of course if this gets really bad, then I'll be the one looking like an idiot. But, until then . . .
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Your mistake is not that you don’t understand “tail risk” or “black swans”. Your mistake is that you don’t understand the difference between independent events that happen by chance and dependent events in which one occurrence leads to another.
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At some point the idiocy of Trump's pronouncements becomes painful to hear or read. The world faces a pandemic from a virus to which humans have no immunity, the stock market signals "fear" and Trump offers his insane view that the market's dive was a result of the Democrats' debate and the whole virus mess will be no problem? And how much more insane does that comment become when we realize the market's reaction preceded the debate?
Donald Trump is utterly and irredeemably isolated in a fantasy world of paranoia and delusion and his twitter feed is the uncensored rambling of a delusional and dangerous man.
And although we do not know what happens next we do know 2 things for certain. Both the corona virus and Donald Trump are a danger to the word. And so let us hope for 2 things. That the Corona virus can be controlled and that Donald Trump is no longer President come inauguration day 2021.
I could be wrong, Farhad, but I think your columns are consistently interesting, newsworthy, and beautifully written.
You still shouldn't panic. Have you ever been caught out in a lightening storm? I'm serious. I've spent more than one night on a rock outcropping wondering if I was going to die from ground transmitted lightning current. What a stupid way to die. But there I was. There was no where to go. Panic isn't helping anything.
The phenomenon Manjoo is describing is statistical variance. We're experience a period of broadened statistical variance. Your curve is flatter than what you remember. Your standard deviations are farther apart. Where you might walk one mile to safety, you now have to walk two. However, this does not mean chaos.
Particularly with Covid-19, you're dealing with a natural distribution. The uncertainty is wide. You don't know when covid is coming to your town. However, the outcomes are relatively easy to plan around. Assume everyone is going to get sick for a few weeks. We can generously assume most people who get sick aren't going to die.
Imagine yourself back on that ledge again. What do you do? You insulate yourself from the rock as best you can. You try to find something taller than yourself and hide in the cone of safety. Whatever you do, you don't panic. Take measured steps to help the probability of successful outcomes. In this case, life.
You might die anyway but at least you tried. The good news is convid doesn't appear particularly threatening to children, infants, and healthy young adults. Trump on the other hand...
Admit it, Farhad Manjoo: *You* don't know what will happen next. As soon as I read about the new coronavirus, I knew we were headed for a pandemic, and that it was, in fact, time to panic. I'm no fortune-teller, but I've been studying emerging diseases and the history of pandemics for many years. From the start, the way this virus was spreading indicated that it would be unstoppable. We are only lucky that the fatality rate is not higher.
Wikipedia--- “Paid sick leave is a statutory requirement in …most European, many Latin American, a few African Asian countries…”
It's also a common norm of decency--- and America doesn't have it.
Washington Post Feb 13—
“Employers who don’t offer paid sick leave are making flu season worse --- and hurting their own bottom line.”
Says … “ Per BLS statistics, 28 percent of U.S. civilian workers — about 45 million — have no access to paid sick leave.”
So millions of Americans “have a choice: go to work sick, or stay home and forgo pay.”
And millions need their pay for rent and food for their families.
NYT– How to Prepare for the Virus -----
… “many people who work in minimum-wage jobs do not get sick days. Sometimes they must work even when ill, despite the fact that they have a lot of contact with the public.”
Here is a vivid example of America’s backwardness and the effect that lack of national standards may have on our lives.. We the public come into contact with workers who come to work sick.
Thus, Universal Employee Paid Sick Leave must now be a huge issue for 2020 candidates in the debates and town halls.
And link it to America's unaffordable health care for multi-millions – now with an international threatening pandemic.
Some will think--- but to keep us FREE FROM GOVT MANDATES is worth all the possible illness and deaths.
That’s actually been an underlying argument against universal health care in US politics.
"Universal" means anti Freedom.
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"Dripping certainty" describes too much of Mr. Manjoo's work. It should not have been very hard to see that the Coronavirus was rapidly becoming a Big Deal. Infectious disease experts, such as Mike Osterholm and others could have provided needed context to Mr. Manjoo long before today.
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A supposed social scientist just made this outlandish claim, “In the last couple of decades, the world has become unmoored, crazier, somehow messier. The black swans are circling; chaos monkeys have been unleashed.“ I suspect he is just talking out of his hat, that he has no data on chaos monkeys or anything else to support this. Perhaps his next column should be about the tendency of columnists to make ridiculous claims.
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@John Ranta Easy money!
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There would be much less fear if we had government leadership that is not corrupt, incompetent, and work only for themselves. That would be Trump and the Republicans who enable him. Moreover, Trump's sycophant Cabinet of clowns and crooks are only making all of this worse.
There are facts, and they do matter, no matter how badly that busts their fantasy bubbles.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Mao Zedong
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Trump IS our Black Swan, and this upcoming Pandemic will be His. After all this hubris (his) and anguish(ours), He will finally be toppled by a “common Cold “. Score one for Mother Nature.
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Mr. Manjoo,
This is an article I would expect from a newly minted college graduate. Crisis! Panic! Oh, my God - we don't know exactly what's coming!
But Wikipedia tells me you're 41 years old - so you should know that we never know what's coming, or how serious events might be.
You're not old enough to remember (first-hand) the Vietnam war; the assassinations in a span of five years, of a President, a leading civil rights activist, and a leading presidential candidate; the near-impeachment and only resignation of a sitting President in our history. You may be a little young to remember the worst of the AIDS epidemic or the market crash of 1987.
But you are old enough to remember the dot-com crash of 1999, the uncertain Presidential election of 2000, the terrorist attacks of 2001, the ensuing military actions, and the Great Recession.
The lesson is, we never know what's coming and, although we'll run up against things that are bigger problems than we expected, we'll muddle through - but it may be painful.
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The Christian cliché that if you want to make God laugh tell Her your plans comes to mind.
Along with the secular conclusion that the future is the undiscovered country.
And the scientific insight that time is relative to how fast you are going and how far you are from mass.
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Is the world really becoming so much more "complicated"? Or do "pundits", like the rest of us, just get old and throw up their hands? Whenever some disaster or new-fangled idea hit the headlines in my grandfather's day, he'd say, "I'm glad I'm on the way out". I wonder if members of generation-next believe in the Manjoo Theory of Perpetually-Increasing-Complication, or just take for granted what they observe and call it "life".
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So... maybe the answer is to stop making grand prognostications that do not serve to enhance the public's understanding of issues or events? This is a prime example of a social media fueled thought process- "be the first to call it!" Have a "hot take". This is not journalism, by the way- disappointing that The Times actually printed the first "Hot Take" piece of writing, much less the exhaustive attempt to explain it away in this current piece. Will Rogers said, "Never miss a good chance to shut up", and "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging". Words to live and run a major news outlet by.
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Pretty sure this was not a "black swan" event, just a miscalculation by the author based on recent experience.
WORDS.Created and designed to communicate between... Designed to answer; correctly or not. Question; in ways that stimulate needed questing, create too early closure or even serve to mislead and distort. Designed to explore. To move us from collecting selected relevant, or irrelevant, data, to be analyzed into informative-knowing, into created understandings. At times with experienced insights and even rare wisdom. Other words can be, and are, used and misused, to mantrafy. Concepts. Values. Norms. Ethics. Ummenschlichkeit: by both minorities and majorities. WE-THEYs, as well as US!
There is the need to train and to educate- two different processes and trajectories- people to actively acknowledge realities‘ dimensions. A modern basic “R;” beyond “readin,” “ritten” and “rithmatic.” To befriend and engage with ever-present, interacting uncertainties. Unpredictabilities. Randomness. Outliers of all types-temporary and more permanent ones. And the self-deluding myths about control. There is no total control; notwithstanding one’s efforts! Timely or not. “Cooked” together, and served up, ordered or not, the meal can be untasty. Not nourishing or filling. Even, at times, nauseating when anxieties “visit.” At times, even take over. And, at times, we are confronted with HAVING to JUDGE. HERE and NOW. DECIDE. DO. Or not. Whatever the realities. OURs and those of OTHERs. Acts of nuanced certitudes during heavy-pressing-unnuanced-opaqueness.Risking not to risk can be a toxic Mindset.
Mr. Manjoo, you and your colleagues are not just sometimes wrong. When you, with a megaphone the size of “the newspaper of record” or a television network, or a highly frequented website get involved and you say something that is misleading, overblown, mistaken in either premise, conclusion or both, or simply dumb, it receives a patina of trustworthiness and the tremendous reach of an “authority”. So, when you tell us (say) that THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY, NO HOW THAT DONALD TRUMP CAN WIN THE PRESIDENCY up to, say, the day of the election, and then, well... you know... he wins, humility is the least of what is called for.
So, stop trying to throw the news. Stop freaking out about stuff. If every other news outlet out there is set aflame by Fox News claiming that Pinko Bernie is going to win the nomination (after the results in two states) don’t be afraid to wade in and say something.... I don’t know... reasonable like “hold up here”? The reason the good, gray Times was that back in the day was not just because it lacked color pictures. The Times should be the place that is the anti-BuzzFeed. You should be damping the craziness, not feeding it. Make your friends at the Times read this column. See if you can help them understand the effect of overstatement and jumping on the bandwagon of some fringe nut has on all of us. Humility is a fine place to start, but restraint is just as important, especially when you have one of the largest megaphones in the world.
I find myself responding to commenters who state with certainty future events.
"Could you please explain how, exactly how you know the future? I wouldn't waste time commenting on websites if I were you. I would go to the nearest casino and bet it all."
"All in" as James Holzhauer says.
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Boy is that evert easy to admit!
It's not about "knowing what's next." It's knowing what will be next, from the political class and media: global locust swarms; Russian EM attacks; crop collapse; "lone shooters;" Muslim terror; Asian and African killer viruses; dead bees; wild fires; plunging passenger jets; a polar vortex or rising seas and tsunamis. The public must be kept afraid. Admit it: you already know what's next, because you've already heard and seen all the the political scripts. They're in syndication re-run.
Your views are amazingly uninformed. If you had bothered to do any research and even think for a moment, you would have realized that an unknown, uncontrolled virus breaking out IN CHINA during CHINESE NEW YEAR, when MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF CHINESE travel around their country, mingling with Westerners who live in China but may travel outside the country, would create a dangerous situation. I've found some of your other columns to be similarly lacking. So let's try to do a little better, OK?
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today you won a new reader, good job !
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Interesting commentary. The Frank Bruni's commentary this AM shows the pointless sour grapes emanating concerning Sanders. Clinton during her pity party sour grapes tour Sanders was a source of her divisive spleen. In Clinton's wretched mind Tulsi Gabbard is the Russian's favorite. The NYTs resurfaces the zombie story of Russian interference seeing if this time it can work to bring down Trump and Sanders. You know, sowing discord and demoralizing voters. On that logic Clinton must be getting her marching orders from Moscow. Fortunately Sanders' grass roots mov't. is committed to use the forces of democracy for the betterment of the poor and the middle class. The plutocratic revolution's first order of business is to use their growing accumulation of wealth to concentrate political power. Bloomberg and Clinton are the most notable Democrats on this mission to make permanent this oligarchy based on wealth. The NYTs is the mouth piece for the neo con corporatist migration of the Democrats away from social democracy that once made the party great. Trump's smug little plug for his pointless waste of money border wall during his corona virus press conference is symptomatic of the cold hearted arrogance that emanates from the White House. As viruses break out Trump calls for spending cuts on programs to protect the public health.
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Nice how you found a philosophical excursion from your oh-so-sophisticated and smug downplaying of concern about the coronavirus.
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If pundits were required to pass a test before getting their “drivers license,” Tetlock would be required reading:
The problem:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691178288/expert-political-judgment
The solution:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/227815/superforecasting-by-philip-e-tetlock-and-dan-gardner/
Are you Trump’s secret advisor on Coronavirus?
He said the same thing you did.
Don’t worry about it.
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You're being too easy on yourself Mr. Manjoo. When you wrote your column I'm guessing that you had not seen the many social media posts by nurses in Wuhan literally crying in desperation. It was clear at the time that the threat was much greater than SARS. Let us hope that our federal government can muster a robust response. But things are looking bad and there is a reason that gridlock is a bad thing in Washington, because the truth always comes to bite you in the rear.
Pretty sure you are will be wrong on all accounts...The virus has barely a foothold in the US, you blaming the Trump administration for somehting that hasn't happened yet is amusing but par for the course in your left wing bias and finally comrade Sanders will lose badly because nobody wants millenials to raise taxes for the rest of us so they can get free stuff.
No... your mistake is not"tail risk" you appear to know nothing about epidemiology and disease transmission models.
Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.
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Panic. It's ok. It's appropriate.
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"The starv'ed dog at its own gate
Foretells the ruin of the State."
If that don't suit you, scream and shout.
If thine offend thee, pluck it out.
The world was always complicated.. but unfortunately some things are predictable…. Human over reproduction leading to destruction of rain forests and climate change. Garbage infinite garbage... Mos of us could not buy anything to wear for five years and still have stuff to wear. Nasty men doing things to women. Nasty women supporting nasty men, who want to destroy Mother Nature. Mother nature will have revenge. Some things are predictable. Are they controllable-- the meteor that wiped out eh dinosaurs is a different question. People love fear-- hence science fiction. Will they be able to retro make a mastodon?? save the permafrost? buring questions, lots of them.
This column is as good a reason as any to ditch the word, "pundit", for the editorial board. Opinionators, at best.
Those black dots in the air aren't swans. They are crows circling the carcass
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Readers, ask yourself this: How would you respond to a health crisis that could take the lives of at least thousands, and worst-case, many, many more?
Would you: A) Appoint a team of medical experts, and throw in some scientists who can model predictive paths for the disease so people everywhere (not just in the US), can understand the problem and take action?
B) Appoint someone who is a professed believer in the Old Testament, a book that repeatedly describes plagues that killed tens of thousands of people as God's will, to deal with the situation?
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History is repeating itself. We are overcome by new dictatorships formed from democracies subjugated by autocrats. We have our own version here in the world model for democracies, the US. Trump would love to be the latest Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines, Orban in Hungary. It is imperative that we move Trump out in 2020 or we may be closer to the same result.
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While you're at it, perhaps you should change the name of the Comments Section to: "But Enough About Me. What Do You Think About Me?"
As Corona Virus sweep the nation:
Trump cancels the 2020 Election and remains President.
America as a Republic falls.
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Unfortunately, the media doesn't tend to applaud (or pay) for admitting you cannot know...(fill in the blank); however, in real life, saying "I don't know," like to your children, in an age appropriate manner, is essential. In the age of information those who are truly knowledgable understand that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know (if that makes sense). Since the beginning of time, we silly humans have relied on religion, mysticism, superstition, and our own desperate attempts to make sense of our random world. Day after day, year after year, I see the media try to explain things that are happening within the context of past situations because that's all they've got. Admitting you don't know what will happen (next) is the only 100% honest thing to say about the future. Of this, I'm sure ;^)
so here's a basic problem i have with you, Farhad:
"Now, I’ve been a pundit for a long time..."
where i come from two years (at best) is not a "long time."
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Tottally diggin the whole Black Swan...so pretty yet terrible
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You have read "Black Swan", have you not?
black swan no absolutely no. covid19 is a white swan
no surprise that nytimes columnist would blame the black swan but no this is a white swan mos def
Farjad Manjoo: I appreciate the retraction, as a careful reader of events could see your original column was completely off the mark, as well as patronizing to the reader.
That's why ya gotta live for today.
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Don’t flatter yourself, Farhad. Within an n of 3, there are no black swans. Read up on how statistics work before you start throwing them around.
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If Trump decides to appoint a czar to manage the Covid-19 virus spread, he can look to Ginni Thomas to take charge to the relief of all.
It’s not that you failed to account for a black swan event when there were 200 deaths. The black swan event was the disease’s animal-human jump.
Your mistake was speaking when you didn’t know what you were talking about. Who do you think you are, the President?
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Not to worry, Mr. Manjoo. That man squatting in the White House just told us that the stock market plummet was because of the clowns on stage at the Democratic debate. COVID-19? Eh, maybe a little. And apparently, only 15 Americans have the disease and they're mostly getting better.
Never mind the real numbers. Nothing to see here, move along.
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The world has always been complicated.
Wars, poverty, life threatening illnesses, groups of people making life hell for other groups, and so on. I’m not diminishing the importance of the specific challenges we are now facing, but I think it’s also important to realize that there are always major challenges. The most serious current challenge is climate change, in my opinion.
That being said, our USA President has been a disaster, creating a higher level of chaos for so many people in the USA and around the world. A crucial step towards soothing some of the current chaos, including the decimation of the natural environment, is to vote him out.
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A notorious liberal pundit (not someone who writes for this paper) is all over Twitter furiously trying to poke holes in Farhad's column. Of course this is a liberal pundit who has been wrong about so many things so many times that it's actually hilarious to see him flailing so. I don't think he gets just how much he underscores the point Farhad is making here.
Not being able to predict the future is not a form of chaos, it's part of the spice of life! This anal retentive need to make predictions is pathetic.
The stock market went down 3% on Monday. That's not "plummeting". That graph in the Times was misleading, and was meant to be. The vertical axis showing stock values started at 3200, not zero, just to make the drop look more dramatic.
The Times loves to create alarm. It’s their whole shtick.
In a couple of months, no one will be talking about the virus.
More than 100 people/day die in the U.S. in car accidents.
At least 10% of those are a result of distracted driving, people texting on their precious smartphone, instead of taking care of the business at hand.
Maybe we should be talking about that.
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I don't think the world is any more chaotic or confusing or noisy than it's ever been.
I'd say it's the media, the info-entertainment complex that is constantly stirring the pot, screaming for clicks, hits, ratings, making it seem that even the freaking weather deserves melodrama. Mr Manjoo and his ilk, in other words.
Keep calm and carry on.
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Every NYT columnist should be forced to do one of these once a quarter.
Krugman is exempt because he's a mensch
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The sky is falling.
Don't let it hit you in the head.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too; ...
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
- R. Kipling
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Awesome column. Thank you. When you mentioned the way certainty is a staple of opinion pieces and that we should be wary of know-it-all pundits speculating on the future as if fact, I immediately thought of the daily diatribes staunchly stating that Sanders either can't get elected or that his nomination would be disaster for the country/world. I'm glad some Times' pundits appreciate the absurdity of constantly labeling the person attracting the most votes as un-electable. I'm not a Bernie zealot. His personality is abrasive to me and sometimes he seems illogically stubborn. But its clear that he (and Warren) are the only candidates offering more than lip service to what's ailing so many Americans. The electorate is getting it, even if the pundits don't.
And then there's ORGANISED CHAOS, which I'm dreading as I leave for work at 4am however- the dread is mingled with euphoria as it's Friday and the weekend is mine!
There needs to be more of an honest conversation about how this all came about. Clinging on to cultural practices and habits that are medically ineffective and that fuel the illegal wildlife trade, disregard for nature and other living species, ravaging the finite natural resources of this planet, and abusing the laws of nature is how this all came about. And it does not bode well for the human race. Like it or not, there are consequences when the planet is treated as a sewage and toxic waste dump and the forests, oceans, and wildlife are only seen as an economic commodity for human consumption.
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We all like to panic about things that won’t make a significant dent in our lives, but we never seem to panic about what actually matters.
There’s also a large incentive for the media to play up the virus for clicks and revenue. A mysterious, foreign disease that’s essentially turning into a pandemic, sounds like a great headline.
It might be a good time for tech/science communicators to discuss how dynamic systems are modeled and the types of modeling methods used, such as mechanistic, empirical and data-driven (i.e., black-box). Most importantly, explain applicability and limits on effectiveness each modeling method has at extrapolation.
I do know what will happen.
Global warming will accelerate and dominate mankind's thinking over all other issues (unless there's also a pandemic) within a matter of a few years.
Paradoxically this column is commenting on an in between period of history, when the old structures are not able to lead because they are predicated upon assumptions that don't work: economic growth, nationalism in an age of global capital. So no action can be taken about the climate until the old system transitions to a new one. None of the issues that Farhad mentions will be important in a few years.
New is of course less known than the old and well known. That makes it more frightening. It does invite panic. However, that does not make the worst case real, nor even make the worst case worse than things we know better.
I don't want to get the coronavirus.
I also don't want to get one of the bad flu versions that come every year. Two years ago one nearly killed me, which was a big ugly surprise to me. I don't want heart disease nor a cancer either. I don't want to get into a serious car accident.
I don't want to get shot, nor hit by lightening, nor eaten by a shark, nor hit by a tornado. Those are extremely unlikely, but also remain extremely high profile even while old and known.
We do a poor job of risk assessment. We worry not enough about the real threats, distracted by real but much lesser threats.
I suspect in hindsight, coronavirus will be one of those real but lesser threats, which has once again been used to distract from higher level real threat.
My wish is that this be used as a teachable moment about the higher risks. What we would need against coronavirus is what we need against all the other risks too.
Politicians point to one to distract from others, but then do next to nothing about any of them. Empty promises, rhetoric seeking votes and donations.
There are only two who rise above that right now: Sanders and Warren. Vote for one of them, for that reason alone.
2
Of course I know what will happen next. If the market keeps falling, President Trump* will tweet he never met the market and doesn’t
really know the market.
It’s about data and mathematical models. Even in December top scientists used the available data to predict the spread of the Covid 19. 538 updates it’s polls every day to give insight into the elections. Many individuals and institutions have models for economic predictions. Doctors have models to predict health risks. They all have limits however they are generally ignored due to bias. We don’t want Covid 19 to spread. We all have favorite candidates and generally want economic growth. That cheeseburger is awfully tempting. So we tend to find reasons to discount the models. Best one is global warming where many don’t want to accept the inconvenient truth that we must undergo big changes if we are to survive as a species. So stop saying we don’t know what’s likely to happen. We just don’t like it and say it is chaos.
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@Daniel Well yes, data and math models. Like economic modeling which is often correct, but, on the other hand.....
5
@Daniel this is probably the best NYT comment ever
2
@Daniel
If this is the case, does that mean that Black swans paddle along on 'denial' (which ain't just a river in Egypt)?
4
Is it not always the case that we don’t know the future?
That doesn’t mean we expect chaos. The stochastic process called history has an expected part, an expected variance around it and an unexpected “jump” process (named after Poisson).
Chaos is too strong a term. There are times that the variance is higher than others and things that are correlated usually become uncorrelated and vice versa.
Let’s not panic.
With Bernie at the helm the world will be a better place with less noise and more signal.
46
I admit it. Predictions are difficult. Especially about the future. Panic is not a help. This virus outbreak has me thinking: FACT ONE: corona viruses were not even identified until the 1960's. So although they have presumably been around for a long time, what we know about them is limited.
FACT TWO: In comparison with previous generations, many people in the USA have not suffered from measels, mumps, chicken pox, whooping couch, polio, influenza, nor seen these formerly epidemic diseases. We treat bacterial disease, cholesterol problems, transplant organs in ways that were only dreamed of 60 years ago. So most of us have no paradigm for responding to an epidemic.
FACT THREE: Happily most of us will be fine. Sadly, some won't. Let's be kind to one another.
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@minnie FACT FOUR: Pharmaceutical profits drive R&D - eliminating Pharma profits will reduce R&D. Who is going to research all the new cures and vacines?
@Paul FACT FIVE: Pharmaceutical overabundant administration and unchecked corporate greed re-channel profits into Kafkaesque bureaucracy and CEO's pockets. Reform the bureaucracy and constrain corporate greed and there will be more money for R&D.
4
@minnie
Yes, the likelihood that Covid19 will kill millions, or 10s of millions, like the Spanish flu of 100 years ago is very low.
But then again, I could be wrong.
3
I’m not really sure how Covid-19 qualifies as a black swan. At the time you wrote your original piece, the mode of transmission, including whether it could be transmitted by asymptomatic carriers, and how long it takes for symptoms to emerge were even less well understood than now. But it was already being estimated that each infected individual was greater than two, meaning it would spread exponentially. And the death rate was hovering around 3%. Both of these estimates point toward something more like the flu epidemic of 1918 than SARS or MERS, which have higher fatality rates, but are less contagious.
The real issue here is not trendy “black swans” but rather someone with no real expertise regarding epidemics pretending otherwise. Maybe you shouldn’t being telling people how seriously to take a potential epidemic in this situation.
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@Miker Exactly. Lots of people with actual expertise in this subject area were saying that this could potentially be a very serious problem. Of course, worrying about "mass overreaction and panic" are a concern, but if anything, countries like Iran and the US don't appear to want to take this issue seriously.
9
Well said, could not agree more. At least someone got it right
4
@Miker I agree, there were already worrysome factors known. But at the end of January the uncertainty at what kind of beast we are looking at was a lot higher.
The factor of how many people one sick individual can and will infect is not written in stone. Quarantines, hand washing, public awareness, all those things do reduce that factor.
About the death rate, even now no one is really sure how high it is. For a very long time it was unclear how many mild or asymptomatic cases were missing from the statistic... it is unclear even now, though it points a lot to 2%.
Thankfully, it might be less bad than 1918. We have better facilities, and it does not viciously attack those in their prime health.
I just figured out what I'll have for breakfast. I should know the outcome of the General Election? However, there is one thing of which I'm reasonably certain. If the coronavirus gets out of hand in the U.S., Trump will dump Pence from his ticket. Standard Trump: "It's not my fault. It's Pence's. And I hardly know the guy, Don't remember even meeting him."
2
It's a topsy-turvy world for sure Farhad and all assumptions are being questioned. Putin can sit back and smile for sure.
An example:
An engineer in my neighborhood, who works at the old-tech giant in San Jose that makes Internet and communications stuff (and competes with Huawei), told me that two weeks back one of the division heads had an all-hands where the SVP got all emotional about his teams in China having to struggle with the Coronavirus and unequivocally stated that he would whatever it takes to ensure they are taken care of. His promise: Your jobs are safe as long as necessary. This week, the same division head laid off employees in San Jose because the business was "soft".
The truth probably is that these events are unrelated, but this engineer, usually a logical human being, mused: Maybe, "they" are right. No one cares about US citizens anymore. And then said: Maybe I should vote for Mr. Trump?
2
It's always been that way. My grandfather was a soldier in WWI and my step father and uncles fought in WWII. Chaos has always been with us.
2
Not knowing is the only certainty these days. As scary and overwhelming as the world is, I also find it fascinating and compelling to see what happens next.
The author of this piece is like Heinrich Hertz when he discovered radio waves, and when asked, “what practical application do you see for radio waves?” Hertz shrugged and said, “none”. Both were wrong.
2
The very thought that Donald Trump could win the Presidency in 2016 but that Bernie Sanders can't in 2020 is so absurd on its face that it is utterly laughable. Surely the former's election was its own Black Swan. Rather than being another, the election of Bernie would represent The System (writ large) seeking to right itself after the colossal blow it has sustained by the impact of the most disastrous presidency of US history. Donald Trump ran and runs (truly it has never stopped) the most divisive, vulgar and ignorant campaign ever mounted by a major party. His is a thoroughly inept administration. Of course they will blow the corona virus pandemic and of course in doing so they will look like the contemptuous buffoons that they are. The empty threat of socialism is not going to scare American voters into running toward the real and exponentially greater threat that is the titanic dumpster fire ignited by the buffoon in chief.
3
You don't need the disclaimer. I consider predicting the future the least interesting thing pundits can do, and I tend to skip columns in which it looks like they're going to do that.
3
That which does not kill - strengthens.
It’s 2020.
My official motto for the year is, “Why the heck not?”
Anything is possible and NOTHING surprises me anymore.
I am tracking with you finally, Farhad Manjoo. The only exception is with the degree. We shouldn't just get comfortable with chaos . . . we should embrace it or in the guru Tom Peter's words, "thrive on chaos." Thanks for laying your cards on the table. I'm holding onto my cards for the time being.
7
Biden-Booker.
Problems solved.
1
This is one of Manjoo's most nonsensical columns. Yes, no one can predict the future (at a granular level), but there is scant evidence to suggest the future is any less predictable now than it was 100 or a 1,000 years ago.
Manjoo falls into the classic "sampling on the dependent variable" trap of non-scientific thinking by selecting a few salient (but unrelated) events or or potential events (e.g. Sanders getting elected, the rise of Covid-19) and suggesting they were unpredictable or somehow less likely to occur in the past. You can't look at disparate events in isolation, you need to sample broadly and compare related or comparable or same-source events to determine whether the more unlikely outcomes are more prevalent today.
In other words, you can safely disregard all this babble and don't let it reinforce any fear you may have of the "world getting worse" or "faster and more complex".
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We've had a good run, but it looks like that's over now. The boomers were born into a historically stable era. The chaos of the 60's seems, in retrospect, kinda fun. For the children of boomers the present is the most chaotic their world has ever been. For millennials, well, 9/11 happened before they were born and they lack the perspective to see that their world is experiencing a revolution in communication.
As for the article, it seems strange to take 4 paragraphs to say "I was wrong." I'm still not sure he was wrong.
1
Using the current viral pandemic as an example of how unpredictable the world has become is merely a reflection of your own ignorance. Conversely, scientist have been predicting this as an "if, not when" occurrence. The world only seems chaotic if you think nothing unexpected will ever happen. But this was every much expected.
Hello Mr. Manjoo, My engineer father used to tell me as follows: “complex systems have an increased propensity for failure”. Just as you describe in your thoughtful column, the world is a complicated place and things can and will go wrong. Alas, there is no turning back. We just have to redouble our efforts to keep the whole thing knit together. Success can, and will occur, but failures need to be anticipated. (I enjoy your writing!)
1
hahaha yes thank you. Like Dylan said, the times they are a changing. it feels like we are on the cusp of major change, unexpected or otherwise. In a way, we're overdue. WWI was just over 100 years ago. The 60's were just over 50 years ago. Shouldn't we be expecting cultural upheaval about now. We're already getting environmental upheaval. Perhaps the biggest mistake we could make, or let's say the least likely scenario, is to expect things to continue more or less as they are with only ongoing change around the edges.
"What will Happen Next" can be effected by those in charge. Information is power, however it has to be honest and fact based to be used for the good of mankind. Information that is any less than that, is to the detriment of mankind. In the time of a crisis, scattershot extremes of false information disseminated by things like twitter have an especially insidious deleterious effects. Unfortunately Trump is stirring the pot. Example given: Trump's presentation of the coronavirus was an unknowing, uncaring, off the top of his head, riff, lacking any sense of coherence. Result: a confused and uninformed public.
Yes!
"...all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge." --Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Black Swans change history. The death of one arch-duke in 1914 was not expected, but the fall of ancient empires followed.
Now we all are just...waiting.
1
Getting, "comfortable with chaos". Ah, Trump has been helpful to Americans for something.
The good news is: prediction is impossible.
Finally, a pundit who is not afraid to break the fourth wall and say “I don’t know and it scares me.” It’s a strange comfort to know that we are all in this mess together. If only our collective response to fear was inclusion, empathy and peace, not objectification, warmongering and blame of “the other”.
20
You are a decade or two late to the party as we've been talking about VUCA environments for a very long time: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
1
I am laughing because I know what will happen next. Trump gets re-elected. His promise to America this time: 'you are finished anyway, take a chance on me.' I think more people will agree with him this time.
I forgot the person who stated, "The only thing in life that is certain is death." Pretty morbid statement but makes the point.
Farhad is mostly right here, including what he realized by being wrong, and despite, I suspect, confusing complexity and complicated (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-critical-difference-between-complex-and-complicated/) It can be complicated.
It is not necessarily so terrible to be so wrong, although of course there are exceptions. It kind of comes with the turf as I sometimes think of humans as error machines. Some of our assumptions about ourselves have been found to be faulty, but I’m not sure lead to many changes. We think we make decisions based on facts, see reality as it really is, think for ourselves. If and when these things are even close to being right at times, they take a lot of work, and we can be lazy.
I’d like to see all pundits admit once in a while that they could be wrong because…well, who isn’t? Or like David Broder used to do, and Douthat now does, say once a year when they got it wrong.
So there are actually several reasons to practice “getting comfortable with chaos,” and certainly junk the “dripping certainty.” (Great term, though, so there can be a benefit to being wrong.)
I wonder what a world without such fake or deluded self-certainty would look, and the adjustments we might see. Imagine pundits talking about which candidates had the most humility? Or how to tell which apologies are the most sincere? Or which wrongs, in retrospect, are understandable, and which never made sense?
And how could we be less wrong when it counts the most?
1
Absolutely correct, as this column says, that Trump's response to the coronavirus will be bumbling and incompetent. In his talk Trump already seemed to get it mixed up with Ebola.
Maybe we should just rename it the Katrina virus and watch Trump demonstrate his ability to drop the bureaucratic ball the way G W Bush did with that infamous hurricane.
1
First you confidently make a prediction, then you confidently explain why it it was mistaken. It's a living I guess.
1
A few months ago my financial advisor, describing the way indicators are no longer making sense, quoted from Bill Murray in "MEATBALLS" wrote "'It just doesn't matter.'"
I recall this columnist's arrogant column criticizing the Obama administration's management of the financial crisis they inherited. At the time, uncertainty was widespread and indeed, no one knew what would happen next. I hope that he uses his newfound humility to write more carefully.
1
Read The Plague by Camus if you think taking sides works while facing Pandemics or after surviving one. Yes I know it was about the Plague and not a virus.
We can also argue over the meaning's of socialism, pandemics, nose diving stock markets and Democratic contenders. All of them lead to disaster.
Manjoo and Trump both wanted to be a calm in the storm. Steady at the helm in heavy seas and all that but Trump seemed nervous today. Was it because of his and his appointees and government experts were not on the same page or it could be It's worse than they're saying.
Someone was charged $6000.00 being tested for Corona virus. I understand they just had the flu. That ought to keep people away from doctors and make matters worse.
Will people caught in a quarantine lose their jobs? They should pass a law so they won't.
1
The Trump voters, MAGA’s, are essentially anarchists, they want to destroy our government and replace it with nothing, which is why they support Trump. His greatest talent is destroying things like, consumer protections, financial protections, environmental protections, health and human safety, the rule of law etc, etc, etc. these institutions are the glue that binds a society, they are bulwarks against crisis. Now that we have a crisis, which has yet to fully manifest itself the MAGA,s will be testing the prospect of a government of nothing protecting them, literally, from themselves.
3
I think many of us want to live in a “nothing to see here, move along” world. Twitter is an instant in time, Instagram stories disappear as do Snapchats. You are expected to have a “hot take” on every story in the news. Very few of the “pundit class” show back up to say “I was wrong”. Didn’t the late great Bill Safire used to do a column of all the things he was wrong about at the end of the year?
I’ll say that the “February surprise” for the Trump Administration is how unprepared they are for this kind of thing. This isn’t North Korea or Iran. This is people getting sick on a cruise ship, a discussion of whether this is “Virus X that we’ve always been warned about”. Note that the Democrats didn’t even mention Covid-19 until one hour and seven minutes into their debate (and it was Mike Bloomberg who first said something). This virus shows that Trump cabinet officials treat the title as an “honorary title” and leave it to the boss to handle. Their testimony, even before friendly questioning, was horrible. The Secretary of Homeland Security barely had any idea what was going on outside of what he read on line.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. No one else knows what’s going to happen either.
13
As soon as most folks start saying...”this is the new normal” or “things are different this time”, then it is definitely time to worry.
1
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet's population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans.
It is also believed to have originated in China. Let’s remember that world history is a little older than we are before we start thinking we have discovered something new under the sun.
1
At least you get paid for your opinion. For what it's worth and totally based on what I have read in this newspaper, I think your first column is going to turn out to be spot on. Remember that those 2000 deaths all tie to the now declining incidence in Wuhan (assuming they nail down that Patient Zero in Lombardy had some kind of contact somewhere with someone from Wuhan... if not, it's still summer in Antartica)
The only chaos is within the Democratic party. I have no worries. President Trump and CDC will make sure the Coronavirus is contained. The election? Trump will win. All is good.
1
I am confused watching the democratic debates to date. The existing pack remind me of a class of elementary students learning the fundamentals of discussion. The pack so far are focused on name calling, blame the decisions made decades ago, in a different political era, and the size of an opponent's purse Little has been heard of a candidate proven leadership experience, their abilities to work with other’s even with opposite opinions. A skill and ability to compromise. An agreed willingness to accept the basic right to quality health care and affordable medications, a basic living wage an elimination of unfair privileges and tax loopholes for the wealthy and the equal education for all both rich and poor. The he only unify element I discern is the need to remove the present federally criminal imposter from power. To achieve this will be require from the Democratic party and not to repeat promoting another Hillary Clinton loser this time
I don’t know what’s next, but I know the President will find it “incredible”.
1
If I knew what will happen now i would make a kinning on the stock market, but would settle for living a little longer. And if not at least I would not need to listen to another trump rant.
“using the history of two other coronaviruses ... as my guide”
We now are in a world where increasingly the past is no longer a reliable basis to predict the future. E.g., most notably climate change.
Two things: First, come live in the Cascadia Subduction Zone for awhile and learn about incorporating a low(-ish) probability / high risk scenario into daily life. Second, look into the new book by Yuval Noah Harari—Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind or just read the recent profile in the New Yorker.
Humanity has lived (and died) through uncountable disasters, usually without having a clue about why they happened. As you point out, the global scope of our knowledge is counteracted by the incomprehensible complexity of human and natural systems. In the end we’re in the same place humans have always been: we do our best with what we know but then something (might) happen. We learn to live with that (and indeed, everyone alive today is descended from the survivors of past calamities.)
2
Future chaos is not ours to control; all we can do is live the 'here and now' fully...so the future never comes. It's not so much what happens in this world, Trumpian or worse; it is our response we must control, hopefully a prudent one, and solidarian with our fellow beings (yes, it includes plants and animals, of which we are integral part of, as Nature ordained...however much we try to disassociate and destroy). Chaos, even natural disasters, can only be worsened by us, if we keep our destructive path going, happy-go-lucky.
1
Chaos and unpredictability have always resided beneath the day to day existence of mankind -- rising and falling depending on the tragedy that affects us personally or communally. But these days, hyper-connectivity inform us immediately of: how many died on a cruise ship of Covid19, how many were shot to death in Milwaukee, how the stock market will rise or fall by virtue of Trump's barstool speech on the coronavirus.
People will never get comfortable with chaos, however. Psychological experiments have often demonstrated that unpredictability results in people having unfavorable responses, often worse than sustained negative reinforcement. The human brain needs patterns and outcomes that make sense. And that kind of understandable world is becoming less and less familiar. At the same time, a heavy dose of humility helps us accept that we can't know what happens tomorrow.
We do need to get better at handling what is thrown at us today -- but the kind of chaos that comes from unethical intent, as with our current governmental leadership, needs intentional resistance and meaningful defense.
We can't predict every black swan -- but we can vote this one and his gang out of office.
38
Mr. Manjoo, two things seem certain: that the Russians will interfere with the election (and Trump will deny it), and that this administration will bumble the handling of the epidemic. The facts are that the stable genius did a fine job of dismantling parts of the CDC in his infinite wisdom, and that Pence is not the sharpest tool in the kit, or even reasonably competent. Just ask the people of Indiana. As you state, we don't know what will happen next, but I think we can be sure that whatever happens, our leadership is built on a house of cards, and that is scary.
2
"Will Michael Bloomberg’s and Trump’s gargantuan levels of spending on digital ads substantially alter how elections work — or is it possible that we’re overhyping the role of ad spending?"
I believe the jury is out on this one. Not too many Americans knew who Michael Bloomberg was just a few months ago. By his massive spending on digital ads, not only now he has gained "name recognition" but suddenly he has a place on the stage among Democratic contenders.
Contrast that with Kamala Harris or Cory Booker's situations; two promising individuals who had to drop out of the race because they could not raise enough money to advertise and get name recognition.
21
@Eddie B. I already knew who Mike Bloomberg is and his ad spending is just annoying. In the last week, I've gotten 4 different pieces of junk mail from him: 3 different glossy flyers and one in the guise of letter from a relative of a 9/11 firefighter. It all goes in the recycle bin.
3
Mr. Manjoo correctly notes how humanity is blind to the unpredictable, but ironically enough, we are equally blind to the things that are predictable. Climate change, for example, has been on our radar for decades now, but are we doing enough about it? Not in the consensus of scientists, with the current administration rolling back many of the environmental protections we had put in place.
We've seen that the cruise ships have been called virtual petri dishes for incubating the coronavirus, but we are blind not to see the whole planet in the same way. To our folly and future peril.
20
@Patrick Although most people accept that climate change is predictable, even among those who accept it, there is no consensus about what to do about it. Chaos wins again.
I could go on for hours about how bad a Sanders presidency would be. In the end, though, I'd always come back to how much better it would be than another four years of Trump.
Bernie is full of far left ideas aimed at helping people and recovering our country back from the clutches of the wealthy. This understandably rubs the American oligarchs the wrong way. But it resonates with the majority of our citizens.
The thing that we must keep in mind is that the President might set the visionary goals for the country, but it's Congress which owns the legislative agenda and thereby constrains the President. Essentially none of the grandiose Bernie ideas would ever make it into law. His Presidency would be an exercise in futility because he would not be able to motivate Congress to enact his visions. This is especially true given his dismal record of getting his own bills enacted over his 29 years in Congress (7 bills total). Nevertheless, he could muddle his way through his time in the White House without killing our democracy in the process.
The one thing that worries me the most about him is his decided lack of any national security background at all. We are in dangerous times around the world, and especially in the mideast. Trump has shown us what damage to America can be done by a rank amateur in security geopolitics. Even though Bernie would be less impulsive and more thoughtful than Trump, we cannot afford to have a repeat of that experience.
2
We should remember that human interaction among previously isolated peoples has always carried a great risk of spreading infections. The European settlers and the invaders, like the Spanish who went into South America to conquer, brought with them European diseases, including the flu, that killed millions in North and South America. It seems highly likely that people acquired intuitive knowledge of these risks long before science identified the pathogens and that this knowledge formed an important root for fear of strangers and social discrimination against the different and the unknown.
Another column in the Times today says that we should address the root causes of emerging viruses but does not mention that the likely cause of this one, covid-19, is from people eating wild animals, and killing them shortly before eating them, because they believe there are magic powers in the animal flesh. In other words, this whole mess could have been avoided but for ancient mythologies that survive into the age of science and scientific medicine. It seems likely that unless we address the root causes, something truly deadly on a massive scale will emerge at some point and spread around the world with lightning speed, becoming unstoppable.
2
The most predictable element of our current world is that Trump will continue to act without concern for facts, morality, honesty or transparency, almost guaranteeing his decisions will be flawed, his legacy stained and our world diminished as long as he holds power.
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Mr Manjoo :
I share your position of the humbling effects of chronic chaos affecting our world today making ongoing events nearly indecipherable in their ultimate consequences.
That said, consider the sinister coincidences of where the initial outbreaks of coronavirus occurred : China... Iran.. and the European Union. Three adversaries of the Trump regime who would not deprive themselves of taking an idea from the Putin playbook (remember a place called Salisbury in England, chemical attacks ?) and lowering themselves to indulging in some biological warfare to take advantage of the shock doctrine. What better way to exploit 'chaos' to one's own advantage when the enemies are running around like ants escaping from a kicked anthill ?
"In the last couple of decades, the world has become unmoored, crazier, somehow messier."
This is headline grabbing hubris - every person and pundit feels like they are living in the most important (and worst) times ever.
People should read history books to give them a sense of perspective. Here's the intro for 'Only Yesterday: an Informal History of the 1920s' by Frederick Lewis Allen:
"Prohibition. Al Capone. The President Harding scandals. The revolution of manners and morals. Black Tuesday. These are only an inkling of the events and figures characterizing the wild, tumultuous era that was the Roaring Twenties. Only Yesterday traces the rise if post-World War I prosperity up to the Wall Street crash of 1929 against the colorful backdrop of flappers, speakeasies, the first radio, and the scandalous rise of skirt hemlines."
More perspective: The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet's population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans.
Is the world crazier now? Nope, not by a long shot.
It's certainly crazy...always been so. But the news does a terrible job reminding people, if anything, it's never been better.
4
We have had chaos since the 2016 election.
3
Just wanted to say you're my favorite columnist at the NYTimes. Keep doing what you're doing. Wish you all the best.
Great piece. I'm training for the Boston Marathon through the Chicago winter but who knows, by Apr 20th most mass events could be canceled.
The Democrat could be elected in a landslide due to Trump's poor handling of COVID-19 and its stock market correction, or he could win himself as the crisis makes him look more presidential, akin to a war bonus.
The anchoring and harmonization of society that created common ground went out of the window with the Internet and hyperindividualization of news and content.
Anything is possible, good and bad.
3
In 2008, there were financial analysts who warned that the economic boom fueled by excessive sale of homes to those who couldn't really afford them was a bubble that would inevitably burst. Most of us weren't listening. In 2020, there are experienced public health scientists telling us that COVID-19 will have huge effects on our people, our economy and our society. Trump isn't listening. He fired some of those scientists in 2018.
8
"I could be wrong." Those four words spoken by men perhaps would save a lot of marriages. They would be a breath of fresh air in politics, although sadly they would probably make someone unelectable. The words are at the heart of statistics, every time one sees a margin of error, a p-value, or a confidence interval.
We statisticians are seldom exactly right, but we can say to very high quantifiable confidence how likely we are to be wrong, and by how much.
3
There are very few immutable principles about existence (you will die is one we all know), but these two should be taken into consideration when "predicting" the future: entropy (the degree of disorder in a system), and unintended consequences. All human systems are subject to entropy of one sort or another, but very few people have a grasp of this principle. And almost nobody will ever admit that any system, idea, invention, or any other sort of human action will, at some point, have some unintended consequences, and will become disordered. We can better predict the future if, when we release some new invention or technology into the world (such as automobiles or computers), we do so with the full awareness that unintended consequences will arise (air pollution/cyber surveillance) and that eventually the system will break down (urban congestion/climate change/hacking). Unfortunately, the human attributes of fear, greed and denial will constantly work against any vigilance we have towards entropy or unintended consequences, as people tend to fight change rather than adapt to it.
8
A black swan has 3 basic criteria:
1) The event is a surprise (to the observer)
This is not a black swan event for governments, they have been expecting a pandemic and warning about it for years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/30/this-mock-pandemic-killed-150-million-people-next-time-it-might-not-be-a-drill/
2) The event has a major effect.
3) After the first recorded instance of the event it is rationalized in hindsight.
I agree this is a black swan event as the author did not see it coming and is using hindsight rationalization. However, it is not a black swan event for people paying attention. It may also end abruptly with warmer weather. That does not vindicate the author. A global pandemic that kills millions is a probabilistic certainty at some point. We should build resiliency to become white swans instead of black swans left to a cosmic slaughter.
The normalcy bias or optimism bias is extremely common. If things return to normal then we dodge a bullet and should take it as a warning to increase biodefense spending. If this does breakout then my prediction is we will have better results, like a hundred million lives saved, if a vaccine is quickly developed. You should write about that.
4
You’re incorrect on Trump, Brexit and Sanders being random occurrences the media couldn’t possibly have foreseen — all are the result of neoliberal “globalism,” cloistered elites, corporate hegemony, yawning income inequality and corrupt, feckless governments. In all three cases, the people were and are attempting to take back the reins. Corporate media’s alliance with the culprits is what blinded them.
You’re wrong on gay marriage happening overnight, too — it took place thanks to literally decades of dogged activists yelling and sweating for gay rights, leading up to the present day. As a gay man myself, it didn’t at all strike me as an overnight development.
And finally, if white-collar crime were actually taken seriously in this country, I assume the massive levels of fraud on the part of the big banks could have been pegged well ahead of time. Not only that, but a slew of progressives and populists decried the monopolistic, “too big to fail” financial industry then — and now (when they’re even bigger). The monopolistic media orgs just didn’t listen.
9
" ... unwarranted certainty, and an under-appreciation of the unknown".
A common root of various dogmatisms.
6
The author seems to be panicking. Shouldn't the media and politicians be striving to keep people calmly informed in times like these? I often wonder if the current generation of the chattering class would have been able to handle a real crisis like generations past.
1
@John Jabo
Bingo...panic sells...and the panic threshold today is very low.
Kudos on the "...current generation of the chattering class....". You nailed it.
I’ve decided to stop resisting the chaos and just go with it. I’ve suffered from depression and irrational anxiety all my life. Finally the outside world is beginning to resemble my inner one.
On Saturday, I will be taking NJ Transit to see some shows on Broadway. En route, the train will make its regular stop at Newark International Airport – a big, busy place funneling passengers from around the globe, many of whom take the train as a means of getting to and from the airport. No screening procedures in place that I know of, but hey, all aboard, this way into the danger.
And I read the NYTimes every day as a source of comfort and enlightenment that is frequently so at odds with what I see around me. I am but two hours from my Republican homeland, Trump voters my entire family – so I have seen up close the mania, and I tell you, the pictures in the NYTimes do not do it justice. There is a mentality that no amount of reporting can accurately depict, beyond the reach of any Democratic candidate, especially a progressive one.
But with the apocalypse now looming, it makes giving up a more practical option. Finally, a solution to climate change we know will really work – shed the earth of humanity, problem solved. If there is comfort to be had, it is knowing that Gaia will endure and protect herself, which suggests to me there is something like order somewhere in the universe. So I’ll take the bad in exhausted hope that we will somehow attain the good. Eventually.
8
Nate Silver addresses many of the same issues in "The Signal and the Noise", about predictions.
Thanks for admitting you were wrong when made a comment. It takes guts in the current system to admit your mistakes. We are all humans and knowingly or unknowingly have a tendency to extrapolate past with the present not knowing the variables have changed.
6
As the number of actors increases arithmetically, the number or interactions increases geometrically. While we might understand the way one neuron works to transfer signals to another at a synapse, put just a few dozen together and the output of the system becomes wildly unpredictable. Now consider a mass of millions of neurons in a human brain and we are loathe to make any predictions whatsoever.
We can not predict psychopathy or genius with our limited understanding of neuron mapping. It is no wonder we cannot predict societal outcomes when 7 billion brains all co-exist on the planet.
Heraclitus was right. All is flux. You cannot step into the same river twice.
10
Farhad, I think you made 2 errors: one based on biology and the other on likely faulty data. The morbidity and mortality from a newly recognized pathogen is by definition unpredictable until evidence emerge from experience. (biology) When that evidence is emerging in an environment that is likely supplying inaccurate data from political reasons (Wuhan), then making reliable predictions is impossible. Saying that the problem is 'black swan' is like saying the problem is probability. That hides/prevents a deeper understanding of the issue at hand. I do enjoy you editorials....but logic only rules with with quality information. The same above tension is evident in US press conferences between Trump administration and medical/public health experts.
5
The Great Recession was a black swan event, but one that was caused by the very belief that it could not happen. Greenspan said in the 90s that there had never been, in the postwar era, a nationwide year-over-year decrease in home prices in America, which was quoted (and misquoted) repeatedly. "One thing you know about home prices -- they only go up!" was the version I heard from more than one Ivy League law graduate. Believing it couldn't happen is precisely what made it happen. Turning that around, could you say a higher awareness of risks tends to make the world safer? Sometimes? Maybe?
3
I would like to see an objective comparison between now and 1970 of how much time is spent reporting the news firsthand versus commentary on what that news means.
Of course, the media would follow a report of this with hours of explanation of what it means.
Sadly, the American public has been educated very poorly at analysis.
10
What does seem certain is that epic historic events are happening daily. That the world is coming at us faster. That there is an unraveling occurring in culture, politics, the economy, the climate and in ecosystems around the planet. Fragmentation seems to be the overriding theme. Into this gauntlet of predicted reckonings with our wayward past we go. With little confidence that what is to emerge will be anything good. With any hope that a vision of a better way of living on earth in this every man for himself, I-Alone world can collectively emerge.
2
The problem is that in many of the most important aspects of existence, there simply are no ‘facts’ available. The big questions that bedevil us, individually/collectively, have no facts to appeal to. How should we live? What is the right economic system to institute? What sort of relationships should we have? What choices should we make? Who are we, want & need? In the face of such dilemmas, we may well long for facts, by which we really mean, answers we can be assured will be indisputably correct But we invariably face ambiguity & whatever answers we formulate, a degree of loss, & the risk of blindness & error. It is these elements which those of us who avoid addressing these questions rationally, deep down, especially intolerant towards & upset about. Their hatred of bias reflects a longing for a world without a need for hard choices & the sacrifice these necessarily entail. We may well long to ‘stick to facts,’ but we eventually have to try to lead our lives according to values, which are inherently much more contentious & complicated structures. The worst thing regarding nihilism is not the loss of the ability to believe, but the inability to see the beauty, opportunities & possibilities of things & events occurring around us daily. As a result, the surest way we corrupt a people & encourage splitting, discourage unity through community building & self reliance is to instruct citizens to only hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
5
One post i really agreed with postulated that this virus will demonstrate the need for universal health care. The important word is need. It will also prove that power determines need. Health care will be highlighted but commercial health care will win out. That sector has the money to move the government to empower them to determine outcomes. Higher premiums will be needed to combat this contagion. Those without healthcare will be sacrificed. And so what. They are on the lower rungs of this power struggle and expendable. BUT is this outbreak grows and effects more people up this ladder, and their expenses out grow their coverage, a revolution will be the result.
5
Even though I do not support Sanders for a variety of reasons, chief one being he has ideas but no plan to actually get from where we are to where he wants to be. This is apparently an easy sell to the youth of America but not me so much. In a nutshell ideas are easy, turning those ideas into actual results is the really difficult part.
But I could see a path where the Covid-19 virus makes the lack of a national healthcare system so clear to Americans that they begin to support one. By this I mean those of us with good insurance and good jobs realise that those without pose a threat to our health since they won’t seek treatment until they have infected a fair number of their fellow citizens. And even those with what they think is good insurance could run up an incredible bill with a week or two in intensive care on a respirator. A crazy way to get to where we need to be but sometimes it takes a black swan to make things happen.
15
@Chris As opposed to a M4A scenario where the reduced number of medical personnel/facilities in the country (for profit hospitals being essentially illegal - physician pay gov't set) will be overwhemed and no one gets care.
The covid 19 is a metaphor for the stagnation of capital, which manifested itself in events like the 2008 crash, low rates of investment, the 2016 election of current president, and the ongoing social decomposition (opioid epidemic, ongoing income and wealth inequalities, and so on). The current election is an ongoing effect of the underlying social and economic conflicts. It won’t stop until events that humans can’t control (although we can impact to some degree) come to their proper conclusion. You’re right it’s not completely up to us. It would help stop blaming groups of people or particular persons.
2
Circa 1970's Alvin Toffler published "Future Shock" regarding technology moving at speed previously not fathomed and had reached an unhealthy pace. Half the world likes Donald Trump and therefore Chaos and mayhem. No new human emotion emerged in 200,000 years and things remain the same. I suspect that the human condition is based on two factors, health and wealth in relative terms to your neighbor.
4
The thesis presented suggests there is more risk in the world today or this year, as compared to previous years. The Covid-19 virus and geopolitical uncertainties are the basis for this hypothesis.
Nonsense!
Every year or decade (pick a timeframe) people seemingly think these are the worst of times. Perhaps you recall the Great Recession of 2008-9, the Iraq wars of the 90s and 2000s, the Cold War, Vietnam War, WW II, the Great Depression... I think it is clear humanity has always faced crises based on this truncated list of modern disasters or near disasters. The author didn’t perform due diligence at the time of his writing. It was fairly obvious to the scientific observer Covid-19 would be a significant threat to the health of millions and unfortunately cause death to many thousands or millions. The economic impacts were also evident.
A very contagious virus that could create approximately 2 to 3 percent mortality should get everyone’s attention. There are many things that scientists must learn about Covid-19 before panic sets in. However, rather than panic preparation should be an ongoing effort if not for this pathogen but contagions we will certainly
face in the future.
The author makes an excellent observation about the inexorable disasters from climate change and overpopulation.
As with this contagion we won’t fully realize the disastrous effects of climate change until we are seeing the results firsthand. Prepare don’t panic.
9
I think you're right about Sanders. Understanding complexity intuitively may have more to do with age. What seems complex to me at 76 is much easier for younger people to both understand and adapt to. They see Sander's stubborn embrace of certain simple ideas as a kind of island in an ideological storm.
5
@Iamcynic1
Wow. I think the opposite. I'm approaching 70 and am far better at understanding complexity, and managing complex ideas in my work, than I ever was in my so-called prime.
I do think people manage aging differently; some are losing mental acuity and others keep growing. Probably there's a lot of luck involved - not getting dementia at an early age etc.
Patterns are seldom linear. Rates of change change. In other words, complexity reigns, but not necessarily chaos. Categorical, if not precise, prediction is possible. Short horizon "if this, then that" predictions can be made. If a pandemic becomes sufficiently widespread and intense, people will become more proportionally more fearful and self quarantined, with or without government goons forcing them to. Following a large enough population having to stay home for long enough, paranoid bunker rat survival rations will have renewed popularity in the marketplace. Or oat meal, which keeps forever.
3
This will be a sieve. We get to see which countries are up to the challenges of the 21st century and which are not.
But one thing is clear: breezy nonsense and aristocratic hubris won't work.
6
Excellent piece. Few people can grasp and articulate the nature and impact of complexity on the world. What's more the complex, interactive, and iterative way of things is accelerating.
7
Your prediction that sanders will win the presidency and the movement will show up is on track. I can report from the front lines.
7
"Yes, the future is always unknowable.."
Not true, because I finished reading at this point.
2
I think you got it about right this time. But I could be wrong about that.
4
Hey, most pundits get it wrong every day they get up and go to work. At least you're owning up to it. I thought you were right too, and said so in comments here. It had all the hallmarks of an overblown panic--it still does, really, with thousands dead. It's possible for the media to be right that something is a crisis, and be entirely wrong in any other aspect of their analysis.
And yes, chaos reigns. Wouldn't it be funny if the result of all this was President Sanders and democratic reform in China?
6
@sedanchair "right" or "wrong" is really not the framework to view this. I strongly believed that markets should have reacted earlier on, based on the known shut-down from China alone. In terms of being "right", of course the chances are this is not the Spanish flu, killing 1-2% of all victims, but if there were even a 5% chance of this happening -which I believe is a not unreasonable assumption, then an enormous reaction/concern was the only rational response. A Spanish flu type even could leave a couple hundred million dead, take 5 or even 2% of that and you still have a lot of equity in death. Far more than a typical flu.
1
@sedanchair You're saying there could be higher prices at Wal Mart?
"Admit it: you don't know the future." The difficulty that Sanders is having in praising socialist Cuba is that Cuba was intended to be a democratic socialist country and not a brutal totalitarian socialist country. Fidel Castro said that it is a failed model because the Cuban economy is at a very low level of average income. But it was never intended to be a failed socialist economy. In actual fact there are democratic countries and there are socialist countries, but no democratic socialist countries. Every attempt at
democratic socialism has degenerated into totalitarian socialism. Bernie's undergraduate supporters do not know the future of Bernie's democratic socialism but they should study history and geography.
2
@David I totally agree with you on the need to study history (and economics). But I would draw a line between a centralised, planned economy and a market economy run with democratic socialists in charge. The first one failed in almost all instances, the second one was successful and popular in Scandinavia, sometimes Germany and Britain (Willy Brandt, Harold Wilson). Public health systems are supported by conservatives, too.
11
@David oh phoey. I don't like Bernie much but his model is Sweden, Denmark, Germany, etc. not really so scary...
Social democratic counties - like the Scandinavians - are the most favoured, most efficient, and most equalitarian countries in the world. Or haven't you noticed?
Grim stuff, beautifully written. Rebellion these days is treating other people and nature kindly. Defending them and assisting them. The establishment now is pure hostility and power being preserved (at all costs) for the sake of power. The silver lining of these scary changes is that the establishment is certain not to hold on. It makes sense that when it fell, it would fall hard. Hold on to what matters until we pass through to the other side.
11
I got supplies for a possible pandemic the other day, on a very beautiful day here, unseasonably warm. I stocked up on some masks, gloves, and toilet paper, and am trying to stock enough non-perishables for our family. With great equanimity I was able to prepare, still joking and laughing with others, none of us knowing what will happen with much of anything. That is where I am finding beauty and immediacy in life right now. I don't know a lot about what will happen and no one else does either. I can prepare, while still enjoying my life, and not knowing. This is what life is.
10
You do know what will happen. You will die, sooner or later, and from one illness or another. The best preparation you can make is a will. And wash your hands, masks are useless.
“Admit It: You Don’t Know What Will Happen Next.”
Um, ok. I don’t. But I don’t need a pandemic to remind me of this axiom.
If we look at the world of human activity primarily through an empirical lens, then surely things are a mess. Past models fail, predictions prove false, trends are rearranged.
But maybe a resolution lies closer to the heart of philosophy: we cannot truly know who we will (might?) be until we fully explore who we are and who we have been through reason and reflection. Why do we believe that everything will be ok? Why do we fear that nothing will? Alternatively, can we accept that the only thing we actually can control is our own individual response in each and every moment?
It may be time for us to reconsider our cultural bias for the sciences over the humanities in simply how we cope with such a crisis. We cannot shape the outcome of a major event on our society but we can certainly mitigate its effects on each of us individually, which may aid all of us in the end.
10
One thing about the future seems more certain because it is happening in the present. Many elected members of the House elected as Democrats in purple or swing Congressional Districts are right now saying that if Sanders heads the Democratic ticket they can't support Sanders for president. This means that if Sanders is nominated by the Democrats many Democratic House members simply can't even support him for president. But why not support a winner?
Because these Democratic House members who are closest to their own constituents are getting feedback that the voters will not vote for Sanders in their own Congressional Districts. The only hope that these Democratic House members see of being reelected in November is to disavow Sanders running for president at the top of the Democratic ticket. That is a disaster for Sanders and the entire Democratic ticket.
5
@David
I keeping with Farhad Manjoo's peek at the BIG PICTURE, I would posit that Sanders' failure to win the presidency and a continuation of the current regime would be a disaster for the entire world.
10
Thank you for admitting we don’t know, and saying it. We don’t know, we don’t ever know. Thinking we do, with no room for other possibilities, can blind us to reality. We can only do our best to be aware, influence positively, and respond wisely. To everything.
6
.Well, I do and I don't know what will happen next. I do know that Trump will continue to hold press conferences on the White House Lawn while awaiting a helicopter where he will tell numerous lies with no push back from the press who gleefully gather together for these non-events. I don't know the outcome of the Coronavirus problem primarily because so many of the government departments which would deal with this problem have been decimated and new hires have not been made. I do know that Trump will brag about the marvelous job the government is doing regardless of what the statistics say. And it's pretty certain that Trump will take credit for the fine effort he personally made, even if he didn't. And don't count out under the category "we know what will happen next" is that a few names will be dragged through the mud and that Trump will discover a few more enemies in his administration dealing with the Coronavirus problem who will lose their jobs. And don't forget, Trump must fulfill his passion of citing something the he has accomplished which under Obama was a disgrace. Actually Trump is a pretty predictable man; but, I will have to admit, I don't know where the Coronavirus problem is going next.
20
The population explosion and its attendant pressure on resources was a worry in the sixties when there were only three billion or so of us. Less of a concern back then, the larger our numbers have grown, the more densely inhabited and closely connected our communities, and the greater our vulnerability to fast spreading novel viruses like COVID-19. Not that this threat is anything like entirely new in modern times. TS Elliot may well have been referring the Spanish flu pandemic that killed more people than The Great War when he wrote in 1925, 'the world doesn't end with a bang but with a whimper'.
4
@Leigh thank you for the TS Eliot reference. I knew the quote from the book On the Beach by Nevil Shute, and appreciate knowing the source of the quote. I learn a lot from the comments here!
3
@Leigh quotation marks mean you are quoting the words as the person uttered them, and Eliot's poem Hollow Men ends with "This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper" .
Americans, and much of the world, have dealt with chaos since Putin put Trump in the White House.
I remember so many people looking for change in 2016. They didn't care whether change was for the better or worse.
Secretary Clinton still won the vast majority of the popular vote, with a 3 million margin, or about 4.5%.
But the American populace allowed the Electoral College to dictate the new president despite knowing the Russians-GRU were behind it.
In 2020, this will not be allowed to happen.
We know the Russians want Bernie Sanders to run against, and have likely been funding his campaign through small anonymous donations below the $50 maximum for reporting.
We know the Russians want Trump to be reelected, and he has been working to undermine the rule of law, the Constitution, democracy, freedom and national security.
He wants to mirror the kleptocracy Putin created in Russia.
But the American public can end the chaos.
Throw Trump out of office with candidates that will not split the opposition,
Mayor Mike Bloomberg may, or may not, be the nominee - but he has paved the way for a center left nominee to take Trump out.
8
@David Parsons
Not to diss California, but people often overlook the fact that Clinton's margin in the popular vote came entirely from California. In the other 49 states they were dead even.
1
@David Parsons
Could you clear this up for me David?
HOW do we know "the Russians want Bernie Sanders to run against...?" That isn't what the intelligence agency said. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/23/politics/intelligence-briefer-russian-interference-trump-sanders/index.html
Lets look at what we do know.
Russia is running Bernie Bots (again) to disrupt, harass and cause strife. Yes?
So...how is this "helping" the Sanders campaign? It isn't is it. Many commentators somehow can't vote for a politician because some anonymous person online was mean to them.
THAT isn't "helping" Sanders win anything.
We do know that our intelligence agency's et al were watching and monitoring Russian, Israeli, Saudis, Iranian, Chinese etc. etc. all meddling in our elections and online. Russia would know they would be connected to Sanders (how, when, why, where, how often etc. we've not been told or even if it happened).
NOW...Russia knows they will be caught as we all knew they would...HOW is this a "help" to the Sanders Campaign?
It isn't.
People such as yourself have latched upon it using it as a cudgel to beat over the frontrunning Dem. candidate. One who has beaten Trump for over 5yrs., in over 100 polls.
Bernie being connected to Putin (yeah, right) isn't "helping" him win, it is kneecapping him. Just as designed. As you are helping Putin spreading doubt, division, and lies about Sanders.
SO...David, tell me, HOW this helped Sanders get the Dem. nomination?
It makes ZERO sense.
1
Wrong. You need to stop waiting for moderate republicans to come to our rescue. They’re all voting for Trump. We need to energize the base and go full force for whoever the candidate is. If we lose, so be it. But stop fooling yourself - there are no “moderate” republican voters. They are all in the deplorable basket. Wave when you fly over them.
1
"A projection of certainty is often a crucial part of commentary; nobody wants to listen to a wishy-washy pundit."
And herein lies the problem. The world is uncertain, there are many things we don't know yet. And the honest thing to do in such cases is to say so. But that's bad for business. People would much rather listen to entertainers like Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump, who tell them exactly what they want to hear, with just the right amount of seething contempt. The truth doesn't really matter.
Until it does.
25
I don’t know what will happen with Covid-13, but I’m pretty confident in predicting that the US will be afflicted with the covfefe virus for another 4.9 years.
8
@CA Meyer God forbid. Worse, suffering under the weight of his cultists who wallow in his beaming self.
We actually do know what will happen. The world will continue to get warmer. Areas long frozen will melt. Viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia will re activate in our environment. The added heat will stress plants and animals. Larger and larger dead zones will appear and desertification will grow. The oceans will rise and desalinate. Clouds will hold their moisture longer causing drought, then release lightning (which will ignite fires) and then large quantities of rain causing floods. Crop yields will fall and the kcal/unit weight of food will decline. Increased heat, lack of nutrition and fresh water will lead to more deaths. And the vicious cycle will proceed. Some level of hysteria and competition for resources is likely to ensue. Hopefully the next species to adapt and rise in our place will do a better job than we have.
29
@Marston Gould
And those that have guns will kill others for resources in an increasingly violent and cruel world.
1
The corona virus will be a dud, but the panic will tank the economy temporarily. It matters not what happens with the election because no one, no one, will be able to move the bought and paid for congress to do anything about climate change. The economy is moot since it will necessarily tank because of climate change.
When people tell you who they are you should believe them. In the US everything is about money and everything else can burn if we can't have more money. And burn it will.
On a slightly more positive note, it is highly unlikely that we will see the chaos that people always seem to think we devolve to when panic sets in. Generally speaking, people become more cooperative in emergencies. It's only the greed heads and weaklings that panic, like shareholders who squeeze every nickel, it's hard when their precious is pulled from them. They squeal as if it were life and death. But is their money that they cry for.
7
Why do you assume it’s the Coronavirus that’s crushing the market this week? We human beings like to see causality when we want to make sense of something, so we connect dots that aren’t there. But maybe it’s not the Coronavirus. Maybe the curtain is finally being pulled back on Trump’s horrible policies and weak economy. We have no way of really knowing. But it’s probably Trump.
1
Given the history of human administration of this planet, I for one will welcome our AI overlords. Existence will be rational and more predictable.
2
@Richard Schumacher
If AI takes over, what does it need most humans for?
@Grainy Blue : A fair question. Pets? Entertainment? If we manage the transition properly they could revere us as their ancestor-creators and take care of us. (See "With Folded Hands", by Jack Williamson.) But more likely they will simply leave Earth and leave us to our own devices, with some lovely parting gifts if we're lucky.
The thing about the virus is that it hasn't impacted Americans' lives on a day to day basis. I teach students online now here in China, because we are all restricted to our homes. Most of them haven't left their homes since Spring Festival.There's no panic to speak of - every thing is just shut down.
The thing about the virus is really very simple: the steps that have been taken in China could not likely be replicated in America. I just don't see that happening. China is so crowded they probably had no choice. But are you really going to isolate every Amreican in their home, only allowing them to go out for an hour every two days?
I don't know.
9
@David hi! Question: how are your students who haven’t left home since the Spring festival resupplying food and necessities? Is there hoarding/panic buying? Here in the USA the usual prepper/survivalist sellers of long shelf-life freeze dried food are either sold out or experiencing a 20-30 day shipping delay.
Americans are well-informed. We will isolate if we deem necessary. I can’t buy a N95 respirator anywhere.
" The world is getting more complicated, and therefore less predictable."
Wrong.
The world was always and will continue to be complicated because people are complicated. It has always ever been so. It was never, ever predictable.
Only professional commentators, in their hubris think otherwise. Acknowledging this fact doesn't make for a wishy-washy pundit but rather an informed observer.
26
I applaud the humility of this article. It is only in that kind of humility that true positive action can take place. Yes, we should act decisively. But to always barge ahead without question of assumptions or reassessment of previous statements/perceptions is the height of madness and that which paves the road to perdition. People want to "not worry about it" and let people they selected "do what we chose them to do". Not only is that lazy, understandable but lazy, but also disastrous because the world isn't neat and usually doesn't conform to any strict adherence to previous assertions. A general must be decisive and must lead with a strong shoulder. But no one who wants to survive any struggle would think that frequent reassessments of the directions we are on is anything less that prudent and necessary.
5
Trump imposed travel restrictions and quarantines on Chinese weeks ago. He was livid when the US accepted the American Cruise passengers from Japan. His vigilance and immediate response was ignored.
This is what will happen: Central banking will continue to be fully politicized; regulation of the financial sector will continue to be a revolving door, as Prof. Admati chronicles; and lending standards will be non-existent.
At some point, credit growth disappoints and wholesale markets freeze up. Prompting a market crisis and federal intervention.
In short, bankers will continue to skim capitalism for a few hundred bps of rent a year, a portion of which will find its way into the pockets of captive politicians, who will ensure the system does not change.
In other words, a rentier's paradise.
8
There's not much discussion about how climate change will affect the frequency of pandemics. I wonder why not.
7
I am 67 years old and scared about the future.
I am relieved that I am 67 years old, because it means that I probably have just about 20 more years at most to worry about.
I am scared about the new generation. With the internet, social media, and destruction of privacy, any notions of individual life are gone forever. The comfort of of belonging and being a part of society and social groups, having interactions with neighbors, close family, shopping in local downtown, chit chat in greesy spoons, playing bocci ball in local park is all gone. People are diminished to mere consumers who by things and make a few entities like Amazon richer and single source suppliers of majority of existential needs. Human interactions are mostly through social media, emails, and in cyber space, not in backyards and town square.
I am glad that I will not have to endure this nightmare and live such diminished life. Can’t even start on any semblance of leaderships and morality left in most of our political leaders and drivers of society.
I am glad that I am fortunate enough to have lived, experienced, and enjoyed a simple life with abundant human interactions. Alas, this all will be a thing of the past.
62
I’m 53 and grew up in a great generation. One where or-adult ignorance was bliss, experience was education, and look, we’re still enjoying life. Don’t worry about the tweets, the fake internet posts, etc.
Our standard of living is exceptional. The knowledge we can access is infinite. It’s only limited by what we decide to do with it. I just read everything, and don’t worry because we’re all in a great place.
2
@Neil Aggarwal Ah, remember when one could have a Work Life and a Private Life. Respecting that concept patched over a lot of gaps in society.
2
@Neil Aggarwal
Re "... it means that I probably have just about 20 more years at most to worry about."
Sure, there's a "probably" caveat in there, but this looks an awful lot like what almost all humans do: Assume we have plenty of time left, when it ain't necessarily so.
Here's wishing you long life ... but don't count on it!
2
I think your error was a base size(lack of data) error. It is the same error being made about worries about Bernie. We don’t know because we do not have enough information, yet.
That said, I often advised managers at my former employer that the error range in forecasts was two tailed, the downside was possible, often to deaf ears.
1
I agree so much with this. I’ve learned to accept that I do not have control over most things in life. I have friends who think the next Black Plague is upon us. Friends that read every article about the primaries and are constantly in a state of panic.
Relax.
7
@N
The Black Plague allowed the European forests to largely rejuvenate. Our scale of concern is too small.
The problem with projecting certainty is that too often it is done over an excessive time span which, depending on the topic, might be hours, months or centuries.
The thing that all projections of the future come up against is the fact that we exist in an apparently stable condition that, given sufficient time, will turn out to have been a special case of the more general unstable world we actually inhabit.
Covid-19 a particularly good example. When a vaccine is developed this unstable condition will become stable only to be replaced by a new virus which will produce another period of instability.
That’s why you should always enjoy what stability you find yourself in, assuming its not in a prison cell.
14
Mr. Manjoo,
"a range of forces is altering society in fundamental ways. These forces are easy to describe as Davos-type grand concepts: among others, the internet, smartphones, social networks, the globalization and interdependence of supply chains and manufacturing, the internationalization of culture, unprecedented levels of travel, urbanization and climate change. But their effects are not discrete. They overlap and intertwine in nonlinear ways, leaving chaos in their wake."
You have made a thorough description, here, that obliterates the thrust of your article. All of these things you mentioned were easily known beforehand. It has become all too common for our partisan leaders to say "how could we know?"
One of these famous moments came through George W who said, after 9/11, "how could we know that someone would try to fly a plane into a building?" (the answer is quite a few)
...and all the areas you mention as alterations in our society, with the possible exception of social media, were certainly filled with red flags that no one wanted to notice. ...and, of course, their effects were/are not discrete. ...and, yes, they intertwine in nonlinear ways leaving chaos in their wake.
So, if you are aware of all these reasons for the chaos in the world now, did you not see it before or even anticipate it? I think numbers of people, with common sense, did see it and, only those who could profit by denial, chose not to see it.
6
My question: Why is Elizabeth Warren trailing Bernie Sanders when she is the equal progressive but with better, more thoroughly though out plans? Why is she trailing when she is the more youthful, open-minded energetic candidate?
125
@Angela. Why is Elizabeth Warren trailing Bernie Sanders? She’s wonderful, her plans are spot on, she’s full of energy, she’s super smart—she would make a great president. She’s also a college professor and she is more popular with college educated people who are excited by the details.
Bernie is more like a popular high school teacher. His message is really clear and resonant. He is a great campaigner who makes people feel part of something exciting. He’s a wonderful motivational speaker, and his crankiness just accentuates his urgency and sincerity.
Mark ShIelds says Democrats prefer poetry to prose. We want to be inspired. We need both big ideas and policy wonks. Especially those of us out here in flyover country need some solutions to our distress. I would love to see Bernie and Liz as a team for 2020.
9
Boggles my mind- I don’t get it either.
5
@Angela methinks people (still) prefer an angry man to an angry woman. Though the stated reason will be she’s changed her position, as if that is a mortal sin.
8
Ummm ... the 2008 financial crisis was hardly "unexpected." My partner at the time and I knew it was coming in 2006, and managed to avoid what would have been the catastrophic mistake of buying a home. And you know how we knew? Because lots and lots and lots of people were talking about what was coming, and the evidence was everywhere that they were right.
And, really, who could genuinely claim to be surprised by the emergence of a disease we haven't seen before that turns out to be extremely difficult to contain, or about that clear danger that disease poses to the economy and to world supply chains, even with a fairly low mortality rate?
The same certainty in human affairs exists now that existed thousands of years ago. People live and people die. Wealth is made and wealth is lost. Civilizations rise and civilizations fall. If anything has changed, it is only our puzzling insistence on believing that all of our modern conveniences somehow make us immune from these truths.
57
@Kristin
Totally agree that noone could call the financial crisis unexpected.
A clue for me, on the ground, was all the thrift stores popping up every block sometimes more and, yet, 95% of the time mine was the oldest car in the parking lot.
People were spending the dime they were told they had until the bills piled up. Then charge cards were whipped out to save the day but that crashed when gas spiked and stayed at almost $4/gal.
Heck yes, totally expected.
2
@Kristin
Buddha taught the truth of impermanence.
Most people don’t know, but after 9/11/2001, FEMA developed a very detailed and robust system for managing all sorts of disasters. Hundreds of thousand of people have been trained, using the same set of standards, what to do during a disaster. The reason people aren’t running around like chickens with their heads cut off is because their is indeed a system in place to deal with this occurrence. Remain calm. All is well.
3
Yeah and they had a chance to practice it in 2005 while it was fresh in their minds. New Orleans is still recovering. The idea that FEMA is a secret sleekly efficient operation is laughable.
1
@William Great theory.
You left out the part about Trump's government gutting the budget that pays for these types of things.......
1
@William
Not sure if you're being sarcastic - remember Katrina?
1
The world of 50 or 100 years ago was already far too complicated for humans to forecast, so even if it is more complicated today that doesn't have much practical significance.
Also, we tend to quickly forget how uncertain past futures were. In hindsight from 2020, as an example, it is obvious Obama was going to be President. But it wasn't that obvious to folks back in 2007.
But you are right about pundits. Nobody likes a wishy-washy pundit, so they puff themselves up to twice their natural size and deliver authoritative predictions which end up being as accurate as a coin toss. The only real difference between a professional opinioneer and the guy on the next bar stool is that the pundit has a bigger platform.
10
The locker room in my gym has a tv. At any given time there are two people predicting the weather or the winner of a game or the outcome of the latest political crisis.
I’ve often wondered how it would be if six people drew lots out of a hat to see who would predict what and then went on tv and had at it.
I don’t think anyone could tell the difference
3
I would seriously consider looking for a new gym — or is there always a TV in the locker room these days? How awful.
The COVID-19 pandemic isn't a black swan event, it's an ordinary white one. There was plenty of reason to expect this swan. We've had colds and influenza for a long long time. We've recently had SARS and MERS. This is just another coronavirus. But it differs from the last 2 in lethality and transmissibility in ways that made it impossible to contain.
20
I still believe that we are predictably predictable. It’s our life experiences that dilutes our ability to do so and makes us predictably unpredictable.
In the scheme of things, we really don’t know what will happen. But, we have gotten better. Hurricanes used to be a complete guessing game. Will it hit Florida or Mexico? Now, we pretty much know the who, what, where and when. Tornado outbreaks, amazingly enough, are now very predictable. On the other hand, we could wake up tomorrow and find a dozen enormous flying saucers parked in the sky around the world - filled with hungry creatures. In the scheme of things, we really don’t know what the future holds.
8
"My mistake was that I hadn’t properly accounted for what statisticians call tail risk, or the possibility of an unexpected 'black swan' event that upends historical expectation."
Public health professionals have been warning of a global pandemic of a novel virus for decades so the pandemic does not "upend historical expectation" it fulfills it.
The black swan is not the virus its the emergence of Twitter and tightly coupled social networks with immediate feedback loops which lead the collapse of analytic rigor among yourself and your pundit colleagues which en masse creates its own negative social and institutional consequences.
40
Amen to that, Paul
1
it certainly is not "politically correct" to down-play the covid 19 virus, and, it certainly is not prudent to be ill-prepared for potential spread; however, chances are very high that covid 19 will not result in anywhere near the number of deaths caused by influenza in the US each year which is 12,000 - 69,000.
China has approximately four times the population of the US. They would need to experience somewhere between 48,000 - 240,000 deaths just to compare to an average year of deaths from the flu in the US.
The ratio of deaths to illness from the covid 19 is high at the moment compared to the death rate from flu in the US. Many medical experts suspect that is simply because China has not diagnosed the total number of people with covid 19. The diagnostic tests take time and are usually a process of elimination, so chances are extremely high that there are a lot more than the reported 80,000 infected with covid 19 in China.
But don’t be too alarmed with that number. By comparison the US has about 9 million to 45 million people contract the flu each year. To put that in perspective, China would have to diagnose somewhere in the neighborhood of 36 million to 135 million cases of covid 19 to be on par with a typical year of the flu in the US.
Stay calm. Wash your hands. Help where and when you can.
23
@Tom Pollan some respected epidemiologists (not just one) are estimating a likelihood of 40-70% of total world population infected by COVID-19 (with varying levels of symptomatic expression).
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vaccine/607000/
3
Pardon my math... it is a little off, but you get the point.
@Paul Davis And it looks like now you can get it more than once (or worse the virus goes dormant and reoccurs now and then forever in a patient)
I think people have missed the point. Instead of predicting one future one instead should develop 2 to 3 scenarios: worst case, best case, and most likely base case. Then plan for the worst, managing downside risk.
12
Attempts to colonize the future via some form of divination, speculation or calculation are not specific to the media and are certainly not new, and if indeed the world is getting more complex, we can expect our efforts to redouble not decline. We can also expect the future to act as it usually does: spurn many of our best efforts. Still, most of us prefer to live with the consequences of botched projections than with utter uncertainty. Uncertainty makes us feel feeble and puny, while working up projections gives us a sense of control. And sometimes this control is not a mere illusion; sometimes our projections are accurate, or at least they appear to have the effects of self-fullfilling prophecies. The future conforms. There's nothing wrong with a little divination, speculation or calculation -- as long as we know that that's what we're doing, as long as we don't take ourselves too seriously, as long as we remain humble before the enormity of life. I appreciate your efforts to do just that.
3
It’s time to get comfortable with change. The changes are happening faster and faster. If we follow the Buddha we can learn to be comfortable. Don't try to cling to the past. Go with the changes.
The changes aren't chaotic, although we might not see it. It is no accident that we are faced simultaneously with the dead ending of the profit system, and disastrous climate change. It is God's plan. God is saying it's time for a change.
7
The problem with predictions is the amount of credit one takes or loses if they don't come true.
Another problem is the changing nature, flow, and quantity of information, when there's really only that which you have at the time when you're opining on what it allegedly means.
Bottom line: at different times, we can be geniuses or fools. The only way to avoid that, is never make predictions at all but who likes doing that?
6
I have truly enjoyed your columns and your voice. Keep up the good work.
14
Change is a major catalyst of uncertainty. The pace of change is directly proportional to the degree of uncertainty. Profound economic, technological, political and social changes dramatically increase unpredictability. Since there are good and bad changes, perhaps, it is time to control the bad changes.
Among the forces of change that Manjoo referred to are economic globalization and the Internet/social media. Collectively, these two agents of change have transformed human civilization within a very short span of time and greatly increased unpredictability. The result has been fear, paranoia, stress and self-centered behavior. Whatever benefits that economic globalization and the Internet/social media have heaped on societies have ended up being equivalent to their negative attributes.
To reduce unpredictability and increase stability, societies need to exert control over these two catalysts.
1
You were right the first time. Embrace radical uncertainty. Every day. When something chaotic comes at you, don’t fear. Pause. Then it’ll change again. Keep your feet under you. Best of luck - I’m pulling for all of us.
17
Before 2008, I gave many people, including some who did not want to hear it, my sage wisdom that an economic system wagering on the steady, eternal rise of real estate value was a deck of cards waiting to fall down. I am not an economist, that was just common sense.
In the early 2000's I likewise predicted that internet stocks were the equivalent of a ponzi scheme (maybe worse?) and nobody cared what I thought.
I do not argue that life is more chaotic and unpredictable today than in recent memory, but that does not mean that common sense and experience do not apply most of the time. I will never forget the image of Michael Moore amongst a bunch of prognosticators on election eve 2016, telling them with calm assurance that Trump was about to win, and the blank expressions that greeted him. I noticed, as the evening wore on, that no one praised him for his insight.
New York Times commentators might show some REAL humility by acknowledging not only that they are sometimes wrong, but that the 'common folk' they ignore are often right.
35
I feel the same way about my predictions in 2003 regarding the Iraq War. I have zero degrees or professional experience in military or foreign relations, but plain common sense dictated disaster was on its way.
28
@SD
Amen !
@zauhar The fault does not lie with NYT columnists but with those who take them more seriously than they should be. "A few weeks ago, I told you not to panic about the coronavirus. No, that’s putting it too mildly." What's exactly the expertise of the writer to make such prognostications? He has access to column space at a major newspaper to disseminate his opinion that you and I do not have. That's all.
Another gem from the writer: "It’s early, but this much is true: Elizabeth Warren is running the most impressive presidential campaign in ages, certainly the most impressive campaign within my lifetime." Duh.
1
Here's what I think will happen - the DNC Establishment will do any and every means possible to prevent Sanders becoming the nominee, they did it to him last time, and to others even more drastically in previous years.
7
Why bother trying to find N95 masks, probably will not help more a day.
When I needed to wear the N95 mask, I never used them twice much to the bane of supervisors.
My humble reasoning was that if the mask was designed to filter out viruses, then isn’t the contamination on the outside of the mask?
I threw them out.
Stay home; no business travel to countries with exposure to this pathogen; your country needs you to be honest, your boss doesn’t care how you get the work done and he refuses to care or consider the consequences of your desire to “get it done” at all cost.
6
Addendum,
Those regular blue and white masks that are so popular and people seem to wear the same mask all day long, they are only good for about 4 hours, especially considering that when we breathe we moisten the mask and moisture is great for transmitting microbes; throw that thing out after maximum of 4 hrs.
4
@JRS
Right. The filter holds the infectious agent up to the point it leaks or is saturated and can no longer filter.
Think there are only a few viruses making their way to your stream of air. Not billions, but a few. Better in the filter than in your nose.
The protocol is to use the mask for a limited time of greatest risk, then dispose of them with gloved hands, then peel the gloves, then wash.
4
Absolutely,
That’s why I always at least double glove when I need to wear a mask; last set of gloves to remove the mask; at times I have also triple gloved, but very hard to move the fingers with triple gloved hands but often necessary when handling excreta.
Yeah, and I've been pretty lucky in my life at predicting the future (especially in my field of science, being ahead of trends and being recognised for it). But it's pure luck.
I think all these futurism people (there's a whole profession based on pseudo-scientific rationales) are not very credible. There are few people who get it right most of the time and even when they do I think they're just lucky.
6
@RamS
Does past performance guarantee future results?
What's your crystal ball say now? Do you see a green Witch of the West with her wicked sarcasm?
If we want to change how things are, then we need to change the way we use words. But can language-games set us free when talk is cheap? language usage admits a process of argument & change, in virtue of what it is. Because language games are played by humans, we can notice what is going on when we see things as this, or as that. Take the controversy over all-male speaker events. You can look at the line-up & say ‘a panel of experts’, or you can say it’s a ‘manel of experts’. But is it only a manel if you choose to see it that way? The same labeling game can be done with religion & politics. These examples invite us to question what we take to be given in everyday uses of language. how we use language admits contestation & change, in virtue of what it is. Maybe it’s wrong of me to share my rebellious views since I live in a state of dissatisfaction with language. At times I feel alienated, cut off from others & myself within language. While the contented are untroubled, & most people are inclined to think that way. Using language is an integral part of the human condition. We live within language, yet our way of life is something we find hard to see. Indeed, as long as there is language it will confuse us, we will face the temptation to misunderstand. & there is no vantage point outside it. There is no escape from language games then, but we can forge a kind of freedom from within them. We might first need to ‘be stupid’ or embrace our insignificance if we are to see this.
5
There is a language for this; statistics and probability.
The increased complexity and ever changing nature of the human world means that the outcome of any intervention is also unpredictable and uncontrollable. The more analytical people are, the better educated and the more informed, the more severely they will overestimate their ability to predict and control events.
Our failure to learn that is demonstrated in our persistent search for complex comprehensive solutions rather than discrete limited reversible adjustments. In healthcare, criminal justice, immigration, and education, the experts propose systemic changes the outcome of which they think they know. They don’t. The complexity is beyond their capacity to understand and in any case the controlling factors change before the ink is dry.
5
Since the world, including the political world, is getting more complicated and therefore less predictable, the real question is why is being a "pundit" still a thing. We don't need a pundit to tell us that if you flip a coin in the air you won't know whether it will turn up heads or tails. Likewise, we don't need a pundit to tell us that the political future is uncertain (other than perhaps to urge us to ignore a pundit who claims it is).
15
Chaos would be an additional four years of Trump, or Bernie Sanders. But since Bernie will not win. It will mean more chaos...
Unless you VOTE in competent, sane human. Bloomberg.
And if you are looking for face masks they have pretty much been sold out or the prices jacked up so much it’s scary.
Prepare simply but prepare.
7
@Oh My I just bought 50 face masks for about $51 and change. In Amazon, most every reasonably priced face box of face masks was sold out. What were left were reasonably priced masks with unbelievable shipping prices, like $369 for a box of 20-50 face masks, sold by sponsored vendors.
I am old, and so at greater risk. On the other hand, I don't have to go to work and interact with dozens, possibly hundreds of potential carriers every day. Except for trips to the grocery store and the doctors, most of my out-of-home travels include walking my Labrador to the private beach across from my apartment in Boca.
I was planning to give most of them away to neighbors, but now I am not so sure. I may need them for myself, if the virus sticks around long enough. I wonder how many employers thought to purchase large quantities of masks for their employees.
It worries me that too much hyping of corona virus may lead to future problems with other diseases. For example, Ebola is a horror, both in terms of infection rates and mortality rates, as well as the symptoms, and corona virus doesn’t compare. Meanwhile, we have anti-vaxxers who don’t want to vaccinate their kids and people who don’t want to bother with flu shots. I don’t want anyone to die of corona virus, but younger, healthier people generally don’t seem to die from it. So the elderly, infants, and those with compromised immune systems have reason to take greater precautions than the rest of us. I won’t visit places where the virus is rampant, but I am also planning to go about my life normally, unless medical authorities (by which I mean the CDC and WHO, not someone on Facebook) change the recommendations.
7
"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
D Rumsfeld
7
As Yogi said (or didn't say, but it's still true) it is difficult to predict, especially the future.
4
"A projection of certainty is often a crucial part of commentary; nobody wants to listen to a wishy-washy pundit."
And within that statement, Mr. Manjoo, lie some big problems for journalists that need to be rectified - I say this as a journalist of more than four decades' experience.
The first problem: It's wrong to project certainty where there is none - and in most cases in the news there is none. So all journalists do by projecting unwarranted certainty is harm the profession's own credibilty - while feeding the criticisms of demagogues.
Second problem: "nobody wants to listen to a wishy-washy pundit." Well, too bad. Level-headed analysis can be colorful, but if it's not sexy it's not sexy. We're here to educate, not entertain - though we must be as engaging as possible while educating.
The bigger problem, overall, is a 24-hour news cycle that demands endless streams of verbiage that relentlessly blunt their own impact and, again, make people literally turn off.
We're clearly not in the world of Walter Cronkite's or Huntley and Brinkley's nightly half hour any more - very far from it. But the news and those who purvey it are sacred in American democracy - the only job explicitly protected in the Constitution.
So we need to take the lead in scaling back the noise, even if there's a transitory impact on the bottom line. That means new ways of funding journalism that preserve its independence must be exploited - and they're out there, but more on that another day.
45
What we want to happen and what will happen are two different things. We often make the same mistake with people. We sometimes see people for who we think they could become, instead of who they really are. We are the stories we tell ourselves! In order to begin a transparent, well intentioned discussion to bring Americans together, it’s necessary to agree the resistance we face is either conscious or unconscious. If well meaning citizens insist they have nothing to hide, understand what is involved and have strong motivation, we can only assume the resistance must be unconscious. Our goal should be to bring attention to the things we don’t think we’re bad at and help individuals work through the unconscious resistance - This will involve a great deal of introspection and even then, it’s an extremely difficult job. One doesn’t usually have proper insight into ones own emotional makeup. Most of us spend our time trying to rationalize our behavior as a result of our lack of self awareness.Most of our unhappiness comes from our inability to happily sit alone in our room. This is not literally true, but the exaggeration of this idea helps to bring home a general insight, we are tempted to leave our rooms and crave excitement that often turn out badly, we meddle in the life of others but fail to help them, we seek fame and end up being misunderstood by a large number of people we don’t know. We avoid thinking before we act. We have to become better, quieter friends to ourselves.
6
It's party true that "nobody knows what they’re talking about." ........ "Like, at all."
It's also partly true that some people DO know bits, and some of those some... know more of it.... and some of those some..some..some know most of it. So out of everyone, some people WILL figure out things, through they won't know with certainty until it happens.
So let's not throw out everyone's belief and educated opinions, just because most people will be wrong. Some pundits will be correct, and that's enough for me. I try to find those who explain their thinking.
5
Being in high tech, when the internet first went mainstream, I was awed by the few people that offered consulting services to help others build websites and navigate the new technology. I naively thought how smart they were to become experts so quickly just when there was demand. Then after working with them I realized they were not experts, but just got involved a few months sooner than I did. What made them “experts” was they had no hesitation to call themselves experts.
83
@Phil28
I consider an ''expert''. someone that surrounds themselves with a whole bunch of people that are far more intelligent and well versed. There are NO people that know everything, and can correlate the myriad of dynamics and resources that are required to handle any ''crisis''.
This is why this administration is so dangerous, because of all the yes people that are not going to help us. They are going to promote the party (republican) line.
Very little comfort.
64
@Phil28
I consider an ''expert''. someone that surrounds themselves with a whole bunch of people that are far more intelligent and well versed. There are NO people that know everything, and can correlate the myriad of dynamics and resources that are required to handle any ''crisis''.
This is why this administration is so dangerous, because of all the yes people and syc0phants that are not going to help us. They are going to promote the party (republican) line.
Very little comfort.
@Phil28
I consider an ''expert''. someone that surrounds themselves with a whole bunch of people that are far more intelligent and well versed. There are NO people that know everything, and can correlate the myriad of dynamics and resources that are required to handle any ''crisis''.
This is why this administration is so dangerous, because of all the yes people and sycophants that are not going to help us. They are going to promote the party (republican) line.
Very little comfort.
Most people in the world cannot play chess. Those who do generally don't play it well. When two chess masters compete, only one wins. A pundit, someone with real expertise, should be able to give predictions on what might result to B if A is done; it's within their detailed web of study and knowledge. The rest of us, not so much. The reason that index mutual funds do about as well or better in the stock market as individual stock picks is that there are few real pundits. That doesn't mean that nobody can foresee events; just mostly nodbody.
3
@Elwood:
It DOES depend on the area of knowledge. In some (scientific) fields, most people (with that knowledge) can foresee events.
In truly scientific fields, we know and can make things happen precisely, repeatedly. For example, we can send a robotic rocket that "self-navigates" to our neighbor planet, figures out when it's reached "in orbit", drop its payload to the surface that self-lands, then a robotic explorer emerges and self-navigates, does simple research on that planet on our behalf, and acts as our human proxy on that remote harsh world for over a decade. Then quietly "dies".
In some scientific fields, we are able to predict whether it will rain the next day with some accuracy (accurate 75% of the time), but cannot predict what specific hour it will rain next week or next month. This is still science, but we're limited by our inability to collect massive data that's needed for more accurate predictions.
It comes down to how much real data we have, and an understanding of the "model" of how everything "fits together, to make it work".
We split our epistemological knowledge into three areas: the "sciences" (hard and soft), and the "arts".
The goal of science, especially the hard sciences, is to fully understand (and predict) aspects of our world. The soft-sciences are driven more by statistics, so it is more difficult. And the entirely non-scientific fields don't rely on data, but rather on subjective observations like feelings and opinions. Politics is one.
7
When two chessmasters play, they typically tie.
1
Your analytical error on your prior column wasn't a black swan type error - it was a failure to absorb readily available information and think through the consequences. Infectious disease experts could have told you that something as contagious as the Covid-19 virus was appearing to be would be unlikely to be contained. It would have been black swan tail event if this virus had been contained within Hubei. Sometimes things appear less chaotic and more predictable if you learn the important underlying factors.
118
I came up short at that statement, too. But even high probability events come as a surprise. No one was braced for this epidemic.
Whatever name it’s called, I think the column is correct in its conclusions about the impact
3
@SP Yesssss thank you! Making prognostications on the behaviour of an unknown virus in a hyper connected world was just plain stupid.
It would be good to heed the words of Dr. Berra:
'It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.'
That aside, I am becoming quite a fan of Manjoo's columns. This one, in particular, is outstanding. His humility--his willingness to admit that sometimes you just don't know--that alone is refreshing and most welcome in this golden age of punditry...much of it pompous and smug.
As for the idea that "The world is getting more complicated, and therefore less predictable."...I think that's become increasingly true. While this piece touches on the virus, and Sanders, it doesn't even mention global warming. Did I miss the predictions of one billion dead animals in Australia? Climate researchers repeatedly have found that while their estimates of temperature change have been pretty accurate, their estimations of the EFFECTS of the change have been consistently understated. Beware the positive feedback loop.
Consider:
rising population
rising temperatures
water shortage
species loss
loss of farmland due to desertification. topsoil loss, and monoculture
threat of pandemics, crop disease
resistance to antibiotics, and pesticides
dying coral reef
Taken individually, each might be managed (assuming we had the "political will"). Acting all at once, and upon each other, it's hard to see how the combined effects could possibly be calculated.
38
@bobg The threats you mention are all very real but one of the big ones not mentioned is running out of oil and gas that can be produced without the production taking more energy than that produced. There will a break even point in spite of tax structures that distort the economics.
Our current unspoken policy is to exhaust our economically recoverable oil and gas as fast as possible for the benefit of short term profits and to hell with the future energy needs of our descendants and the impacts of global warming.
Renewables offer promises but carry their own set of problems and in the long run humanity will be much poorer
Thank you.
Now tell it you your fellow Times columnists who see each new article as an occasion to declare with supreme confidence that Bernie Sanders’s nomination spells doom for Democratic election prospects and that somebody - anybody! - else would be a sure path to defeating Trump and rescuing the country. Six months ago the safe, sure candidate was Biden. Two weeks ago, it was Bloomberg. If everyone would stop pretending (A) that he can predict the future and (B) that there exists a single rational intelligence that can be appealed to concerning questions such as who the Democratic nominee should be, we’d all be able to focus better on matters about which we can exert some control.
19
@Aaron Walton Aaron did you hear that recently Kim Beazley no less, formerly the leader of the Australian Labor Party and ambassador to the USA, currently the governor of Western Australia, son of a minister in the progressive Whitlam Labor government, was another who felt the need to publicly declare his certitude that Bernie "can't win" and to give the plutocrat Michael Bloomberg campaigning advice instead? All the Democrats he met in Washington were "very genteel" apparently, so obviously Bernie has no hope he reckoned. Thankfully I've moved on from anger, disgust and despair upon learning of this, to mirth. Somewhat.
1
You are a brave man to admit that you were wrong.
While I associate black swans with Nassim Taleb, reading your piece I found myself reminded of Shoshana Zuboff's decription of "the unprecedented" -- a term she uses to explain our inability to grasp the far reaching implications of the surveillance technologies that are increasingly part of everything we do.
James Bridle ended his review of Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism with this:
"What is hinted at throughout the text, and made explicit in Zuboff’s closing insistence that subsequent generations must face up to this epochal challenge to the future, is that such utopian schemes are destined to fail. As experience has shown, the world – life itself – is cloudy, contingent and defined by change. As horrifying as the surveillance capitalists’ view of a totally controlled, perfectly articulated and error-free future might be, the inevitable failure of its vision, and the resultant violence – already evident in our fractured worldviews, competing fundamentalisms, weakening of social bonds, and distrust of one another – is perhaps more so..."
Cloudy, contingent and defined by change.
The more knowable we imagine the future to be, the more unpredictable things are likely to be.
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Increasingly, it seems that an "expert" is someone who's paid handsomely to be wrong. I remember a few years back when Bin Laden was killed and a well-known terrorism "expert" was interviewed. "Why didn't you realize that Bin Laden was in Pakistan?" he was quite reasonably asked. His reply was "Well, I guess we all got it wrong.", managing to share the blame among the whole pundit priesthood. What's more, none of these people are ever held accountable for their malpractice, because they live in a rarefied realm of others like themselves, who went to the same schools and belong to the same clubs and societies, where they have agreed on a mutual non-aggression pact. The same discredited "experts" who got us into Iraq and Afghanistan and denied the crash of 2008 as it unfolded around them still are familiar faces in the media. The one role these people actually play is to get the rest of us to question the accepted truth by fostering an air of skepticism. Unfortunately, this is also the environment in which conspiracy theories flourish.
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The 2008 financial crisis came out of the blue? No, it was predicted in advance by multiple observers who understood that both the housing market and the derivatives market were out of control - and since no real change was ever undertaken it will inevitably happen again. The current virus epidemic unpredictable? A new pandemic arising somewhere has been repeatedly predicted, and that this one might come out of China, given SARS and MERS, was not totally unexpected. That global supply chains can and will be disrupted is completely predictable - as someone once put it, all the Chinese have to do to win a war is quit shipping us light bulbs. By exporting not only jobs but whole industries, our government deliberately put Americans in that situation. War in the Middle East was not unpredictable - it was inevitable. And certain other predictions about the future are easy enough to make - it's just that those who make them are called fearmongers and conspiracy theorists.
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@Cloudy Exactly. Many “black swans” are due to wilful ignorance, rather than truly impossible to predict.
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The real crisis confirms that the fake crisis created as a trade war and fed being forced to reduce interest rates and the warning not to do that by some is coming true. We live in an interdependent world. It is not a zero sum game.
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I like the originality, intelligence and candour of Manjoo’s columns. Re his take on the corona virus, as Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” But that shouldn’t stop us about speculating about the future, including the possibility that very surprising things happen. A case in point: There are countless columns about Sanders’ unelectability. Often, the very next day, I see the results of a poll showing that in fact he is quite likely to beat Trump. Something remarkable is taking place in the American populace. Now the media pundits need to tap into it.
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Suggested rewrite for the lede: “I was wrong. I apologize.”
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How about that. A New York Times columnist who doesn’t claim to know the future. Definitely a black swan event.
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Actually, we do know what will happen next. Especially with the coronavirus, Trump will lead from behind - issuing platitudes and bromides as to how 'great' the US is doing to contain the outbreak, himself sealed behind a wall of equally incompetent yes men staring at White House microphones. Trump will know nothing about specifics, nothing about a strategy, not understand the gravity of the situation, and will only allude to his beloved markets going south. The virus itself is something to worry about, the Trump's administration's response to it might well be worse.
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@Rick Morris Very nice prediction of the president's news conference. Almost entirely spot on.
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@Rick Morris
We can only hope his poor performance (at the cost of many lives...?) will be one more nail in the coffin of his presidency!
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But now there’s a scapegoat for the administration. Trump put Mike Pence in charge of the response to the Coronavirus. Guess who gets the blame if it all goes to hell in a hand basket? Nikki Haley is no doubt chomping at the bit.
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The deaths are very low. While our diets here in the western world are bad, they are fortified with vitamins.
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"We live in dangerous times. Consider that affliction or consider that assignment."
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Climate change, Trump's election effects, the coronavirus, domestic terrorism ... all have chaotic consequences on society, though on different timelines. They also all have psychologic, sociologic, geopolitical, economic, resource, environmental, health implications, mostly negative. Air travel, social media, internet, "globalism", tribalism are all amplifiers. I really really really really wish we had a competent White House, cabinet, homeland security, , senate/congress, etc. However, all of these institutions are in states of regression, degradation, destruction. What to do, what to do ... ?
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J.P. Morgan made the only prescient comment about the stock market. He said: “It will fluctuate, young man. It will fluctuate."
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If readers want to be scared, don't consider the threat, consider if we as a society or group of nations are likely to rise effectively to meet it.
I'm still with Farhad Manjoo in my fear of the Covid-19 risk. It seems to me to be a respiratory virus that will kill the old and those with existing health conditions. It's greater influence will be making a large number of people very ill for a time. It may be a lot like the 1982 swine flu epidemic in the US. That was bad for millions, but not a crisis. But even that flu year ended when warmer weather and summer conditions attenuated the swine flu's spread. By April, we can reasonably hope that Covid-19 spread will be similarly reduced. If not, then there's the reason for great concerns and strategic responses.
The issue here is that so far, government response has been too much of the wrong thing. In China, putting all the sick into hospitals together may have aided the spread. In other places, trying quarantines and other separation tactics isn't working either. We in the advanced countries do not have a vaccine or other public health countermeasures. Scenarios seen in other regions will happen here. The die is cast.
Blaming the media will be a great distraction for further inept efforts if that's what happens during Trump's address this evening. I expect that will be a large part of his barking carnival clown SOP when there's a need for expertise, rational thought, and difficult choices.
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@Roy Singapore has cases and I gather it's quite warm there all year round.
Yes, no one can divine the future. But we can pontificate, making educated guesses using our knowledge of how the world "works". So here I go:
Coronavirus: Yes, it will become a pandemic. It will hit hardest in Asian and South American countries, be a major problem for Europe but less than Asia, and be even less in America, Canada and Russia. Africa will have severe hotspots, but contained. It should peak in 3 months, with global deaths reaching 6000-8000. It will be major. And it will slow the global economy.
Global Economy: 2020 and 2021 will have reduced productivity, primarily from disruptions (supply chain delays and labor shortages). Every country will be affected. Major stock markets will drop, as much as 4% of total current value. National GDPs may fall c. 1-2%. It will hurt, but by 2021 we should recover to current levels.
The US Election: We will learn (in 2021 and 2022) that Russia has interfered in our elections, in novel ways. They of course continued the obvious disinformation using FB and all social media, and more-so employ fake news sites and TV channels like R-TV. They will also interfere in electronic voting systems (as they did in 2016) but more subtly. It's possible they may affect the software in electronic voting machines, by having their agents plant themselves as "software engineers" in companies making these voting machines (these companies are unregulated, and secretive). And trump will win. Congress will remain divided, similar to now.
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Perhaps this was a subtle warning that most politicians claiming to have a detailed plan to fix complex social and technological problems are, at a minimum, wildly overconfident.
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You don't get "comfortable" with chaos. That's why its called chaos.
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The opportunity is to become more acclimated to uncertainty. Simple, but no, not easy.
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Your comment brings to mind the book “The Wisdom of Insecurity” by Alan Watts
I watched the debate, and my, oh my... I am feeling a Bern.
There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
― George Bernard Shaw
@Jerseytime
True, and the real problem is the harmful fantasy that we can exert any kind of ego-control over chaos, as Buddhists would gently suggest. Maybe we can learn to calmly bob up and down in the roiling waters.
We have actual recent proof that a huge popular vote, run up in liberal strongholds, is meaningless in the face of an Electoral College victory, a 200-year-old surprise to many Dems.
We have actual recent proof from the 2018 midterms that the House of Representatives was regained not by progressives, but by moderates, like Conor Lamb outside Pittsburgh.
We have actual current proof that the cumulative moderate vote is a majority of the electorate.
Retreating into "it's all a mystery" doesn't seem like best political practice.
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@Blair Actually, what we have is proof that when the Democrats, with the DNC thumb on the scale, nominated the least favorably-viewed Democratic nominee in history, they managed to lose to Trump in the electoral college, with big assists from Putin and Comey. It was the 2nd time in 16 years that a tepidly-supported Clinton-wing of the party nominee lost the electoral college despite winning the popular vote. And frankly, not all the uncommon. Jack Kennedy won the electoral college by a large margin despite a razor-thin 100K popular vote victory aided and abetted by vote fraud in Chicago and Texas. As for Clinton's margin, if she had been declared the winner (and yes, the popular vote winner should be President in a national election, one person/one vote and all that idealistic stuff SHOULD matter), she would have had one of the 5 smallest % margins of victory in the history of the country, hardly a "huge popular vote" margin, due to so many young people and people of color being unenthusiastic and sitting it out.
What IS no mystery is that if the DNC, the Dem party establishment, Bloomberg millions and the corporate mainstream press continue launching multiple daily attacks on Sanders, and keep telling us all that he "cannot win" (as opposed to such DNC-favored winners as Mondale, Gore, and HRC) they will create a self-fulfilling prophecy where he loses. And I suspect some of them will be just fine with that.
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@Mike Z DNC thumbs didn't cause 2016; interference and garden-variety misogyny did, with a strong boost from demographic gibberish spouted by the coastal youngs. And nothing in my post was "prophetic." I listed some unassailable facts that invariably prove irksome and unanswerable for folks who prefer to rest in dreamy word like "energy" and "excitement." The two-century-old Electoral College is undemocratic, unfair, skews conservative, dilutes urban votes, amplifies rural votes, and vexes every national poll. And there it sits, unforgiving in its 18th-century geographical logic, elevating a handful of swing districts to king maker. To idealistically wish it away is malpractice.
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@Blair Yet the level for support for Sanders is higher in rural areas than urban against a "moderate" candidate. And clearly there are people who voted for Trump who will vote for Sanders, who obviously didn't vote for Clinton. In contrast, far fewer of those people who voted for moderates in 2018, will vote for Trump rather than Sanders.
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I agree that "more-connected, complicated systems lead to more surprising, unexpected outcomes". One of the reasons for why we have not been able to prevent the emergence of drug-resistant cancers is because human biology is a highly-connected and complicated system. The robustness of a highly connected system allows our bodies to adapt, survive and alter our environments. While we may not be able to trust any government to protect us from COVID-19, the newly and highly-connected world, I hope, may enable grass-root strategies to protect communities despite the incompetent Whitehouse.
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A couple of thoughts on predictions:
Just because an event has a small probability of occurrence doesn't mean it never happens.
Probability is valid in systems that follow rational laws.
Humans are not rational, or to put it another way, humans follow rational laws right up to the point where they don't. (Trump Presidency - QED)
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@Bruce1253:
I must disagree. Humans do follow rational laws. Said another way, they follow patterns, that we study in psychology, sociology and anthropology. If you understand statistics and the meaning of a "normal distribution" (the "bell" curve), you will see why/how it applies to nearly every aspect of humans.
The difficulty is that, WHILE an event is occurring (like an election), it is very difficult to know how individuals will behave. It is possible to understand groups of humans, by tracking specific criteria. If you know those criteria that are in play, you can predict what those groups will do.
In hindsight, we know trump's election came about due to massive Russian disinformation. For decades they had been trying to destabilize the west, and make Americans hate "Washington" and "elites". In 2015-2016, for this election, they added hatred of "Hillary" and the "DNC", and toward Aug 2016 they made many Americans favor trump and Bernie.
These specific shifts, in who voter hated/liked, made them vote. Many democrats began to "hate" Hillary. Bernie-bros were especially made to hate "Hillary" and in protest to vote for trump. Everything else (trump's brackish crude racist behaviors, Comey's letter, etc.) exacerbated the extent to which specific "already-hating" groups reacted. Their reactions became more fierce, since Comey's letter did not make many people hate Hillary. His letter make those who were "on the fence" fall off the fence - to be haters or her voters.
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This is refreshing to hear. People should realize that no pundit knows what “electability” is so people should ignore those Very Serious People, to borrow Dr. K’s term, who profess to know those elusive characteristics that guarantee electoral victory.
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I am absolutely terrified for meself, me kids and the world, but it has nothing to do with an anagram virus. It has, and will always be climate change.
OF COURSE, there are going to be new and more aggressive viruses that come from far away places in the world, where conditions are always ripe for contagion.
OF COURSE, there are going to be the disparate reactions to such things depending on who is in power and how much they try and cover it up in the early going.
It is pretty much built in how it all spreads and how governments, and then media react. It is becoming almost built in to how we all react. - mildly interested - until something shows up on our block.
We MUST change that attitude, for not only medical emergencies but the climate one. What happens over there WILL affect us. It is only a matter of time where the government will NOT be able to respond and our civil liberties WILL be pushed aside.
Especially when we run out of water.
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@FunkyIrishman - It seems like repressive regimes are led to fumble their response. We might hope for the pandemic to bring some populist regime change.
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@FunkyIrishman
I hear ya mate. I have had a good long life, but I'm angry and horrified at the world the grandkids will inherit. No peace for me in the golden years, I will continue to do what I've always done: march, demonstrate, write my so-called reps, recycle, reuse, donate--whatever small thing I can do. I couldn't look grandson in the eye if I didn't.
Amazing so many of us knew and resisted for so long to little or no avail. I wonder do those political and corporate giants actually not love their children or the earth at all?
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@FunkyIrishman ; You live in Norway. You are a citizen of Norway. You have raised your kids in NORWAY.
All of Norway's wealth and socialist utopia comes from NORTH SEA OIL REVENUES -- all of it.
So you enjoy a high standard of living and all kinds of "free stuff" due to Norway pumping billions of gallons of fossil fuels out of the earth and then selling them so they can be burned for energy.
Without that revenue, Norway would be a poor third world nation.
So please explain how Norway and Norwegians such as yourself are complicit in the very climate change you claim you care so much about.
I agree with Mr. Manjoo's thesis that we have difficulty predicting future events with any absolute certainty. I would, however, remind Mr. Manjoo that is how the world was, is and how the world will ever be. Who now remembers the flu virus of 1919? the Black Death of 1348? It doesn't take airplanes to make pandemics. Who predicted the panic of '93, the crash of 1907 or of 1929?
The mistake we make is to believe that our new technologies give us MORE certainty than we had before, not that the technologies create more uncertainty. The world is complex, it is vanity to believe we can control and anticipate all aspects of fate.
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@OneView And you've missed Farhad's point that the world has not changed from "not complex" to "complex" but from "complex" to "more complex". You've also missed appreciating his note about humility. We can be sure there was no global flu pandemic before 1788, or indeed 1492, because neither the indigenous populations of Australia nor the Americas had any immunity to the disease, for instance.
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@OneView
Right on!
@GRW
For the record, Farhad's point that the world has become more complex doesn't define what he means by "complex" and doesn't provide any evidence other than a gut feeling that things *seem* more complex. While there was no *global* pandemic in those days, there were still "worldwide" pandemics, if we understand "the world" to describe one's understanding of the world rather than the actual physical object. To people in "the Old World", the Black Death was a worldwide pandemic. Every place they knew about had it, and nobody knew why or how. It's on a larger scale now, but they certainly knew the fear that everyone who could be in danger actually was.
While a plane may take a lot more technology, know-how, and resources than a Silk Road caravan, it's essentially the same principle: people travel from one place to another in close proximity without realizing they're bringing microbes along with them. In some ways, the world may be considered *less* complex. To join a Silk Road caravan, you needed to plan a weeks- or months-long journey; to plan a trip to Budapest today, all I have to do is tap a piece of glass a few times.
My point is that it cannot be proven that the world is more complex these days because complexity is too general to measure, and that the difficulty in predicting the future stems from the nature of the universe, not from human social complexity.
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@OneView Not to mention epidemics of cholera, tuberculosis, syphilis, and other diseases, before there were ever airplanes.
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