There is a narrative slowly emerging that Corona (Covid-19) is a true Black swan event. For example, according to Fred Cleary, a portfolio manager at Pegasus Capital, quoted in the FT’s excellent Long View Column, “Covid-19 is a black swan”. I could be wrong, but from recollection of reading the book, a Black Swan event is something that people cannot possibly imagine and therefore cannot possibly predict.
9/11 was a Black Swan event. Corona virus is not. In scenario-speak it is a wild card event that breaks all scenarios, but this is most definately not something that has not been foreseen. I worked with an Australian bank back in 2005 and a pandemic was on the table so to speak. It was one of the main topics of a UK government risk workshop in 2015 (by main topic I mean it was one of the events considered most probable (when not if as they say), it featured in some strategic trends work with the UK Ministry of Defence too (again, as a strategic shock), in some library scenarios, some work for KPMG and finally some disruption cards created with Imperial College.
The problem, of course, is not predicting, forecasting or foreseeing, but in assigning probability to such events or ideas. If the probability is widely considered to be low it will be largely ignored. It also touches on not what, but whom, in the sense of who gets listened to, why and when. BTW, is this is all a bit doom and gloom, my view is that the current pandemic is quite mild in terms of mortality. This too will pass, although next time we may not be so lucky.
From the Bookends Scenarios (PLNSW) 2010KPMG cards circa 2012Imperial Disruption cards 2018 – note linkages between cards
i just remembere that i wrote this back in 2012 for a book called The Future: 50 Ideas you really need to know. Of course, if you write enough, and then wait long enough, almost anything can come true.
The text below is from the draft, so doesn’t exactly appear above.
41
Biohazards & Plagues
You
might have noticed that some of the previous ideas where perhaps getting a
little silly. Or perhaps I was. No
drama. This next lot of ideas will soon sort us all out. Instead of intelligent machines, immortality
and alien life how about a few mass extinctions, genetic terrorism or some good
old-fashioned plagues?
Something, sometimes, strikes me as rather
odd. Namely that we somehow assume that
life will go on, more or less as it has always done. But ‘always’ is actually a
rather contemporary concept. We compare the present to the relatively recent
past. This we do not take into account, for example, world wars one and two
(around 70 million men, women and children killed) or the great flu pandemic of
1918-19 (somewhere in the region of 20-40 million dead). Going much further
back we had the Black Death, which killed something like 30-60% of Europe’s
population.
We’ve been lucky. So, what other doomsday scenarios are there
out there? Well it’s another long list. The problem is essentially two-fold.
First more of us are living closer together in crowded cities and moving around
in an interconnected world more easily thanks to various regulations and
innovations in transport and infrastructure. We’ve even got our animals closer
together – and closer to us some might argue – than previously. This means that
when something nasty like a naturally occurring pathogen does break out it
travels much faster – and has the potential to travel much faster and further
between species too. This goes some way
to explain recent outbreaks of H5N1 virus, SARS, dengue and Ebola, all of which
initially originated in Animals and were then spread by humans.
The second problem is technology. New
technologies are emerging faster, many are quite powerful and many can be used
in bad ways as well as good. Genetics is
a case in point. Genetics means that it is possible to create new and novel
micro-organisms. Most of the time genetics will be for peaceful and products
purposes. But there is no reason why some day someone (it’s Dr Evil again)
won’t do something a little more sinister. As usual this has happened already
in a sense. Smallpox and anthrax have been used as weapons before and more
recently we’ve had the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system where the
result of a few deranged minds. So how
about someone creating a new deadly micro-organism which, for instance, is only
lethal to a specific race or ethnicity? Stealth and deniability all rolled into
one.
Consequences? Apart from an outbreak of
fear there would be an initial issue relating to the mass disposal of bodies.
Many of the ideas we cherish – like saying good bye to loved ones or being able
to visit their graves, might vanish. We would be back to plague pits, at least
in the early days. There are also the economic effects.
Work done by Warwick McKibbin at the Lowry
Institute in Sydney (quoted in Alok Jha’s book, The Doomsday Handbook) suggest that a mild repeat of the 1918 flu
pandemic would kill almost 1.5 million people and would reduce economic output
by b$330 billion (in 2006 prices).
A large repeat might kill 142 million and
shrink output in some economies by as much as 50%. Or maybe it’s more prosaic than that. Maybe
the next plague is Type-2 Diabetes?
Maybe millions will die simply because they eat too much and don’t go
outside and walk around enough. As for biotech disasters, the potential is
serious mishaps is significant. What if poor synthetic biology regulation leads
to people taking short-cuts, which leads to the creation of a new form of bug
that can’t be got rid of using any known techniques? The bug might not be a
problem on its own, but if it destroyed the world’s wheat, maize or rice crop
the result could be mass starvation within particular regions.
Or maybe problems will occur from a combination of factors. What if global demands for meat creates issues surrounding the disposal of animal carcasses? This could cause a growth in feral dogs in some parts of the world that could lead to massive increases in rabies. Or what if a global economic boom meant more pool building swimming pools, but the boom is followed by bust and the homes are repossessed leading to stagnant water in swimming polls, which in combination with warmer weather caused by climate change leads to outbreaks of malaria?
BTW, worth pointing out the 2012 entry on the timeline for this, which reads: “A typical year for the common flu (3,000-5,000 killed in the USA). ” Context people, context.
A scenario matrix from my friend Nick Turner at Stratforma. His explanation below.
The framework is built on the axes of two critical uncertainties:
The nature of global coordination; “slow and inadequate” vs. “fast and efficient”
The nature of public response; “panicked” vs. “disciplined”
When placed in a 2×2 matrix, four scenarios unfold:
“Déjà Flu”: a world where despite national governments and multi national agencies responding in a responsible and coordinated fashion, feed “too much” information, the public over-react, resulting in irrational consumption and even xenophobic outrage.
“Keep Calm & Carry On”: a world where the virus spreads but effective quarantining and treatment contain the epidemic and the public display unexpected resilience, as the media behave in a more retrained way.
“Plus ça Change”: a world of disparity in response across the globe between developed and developing economies, the population of latter, despite experiencing high mortality rates, shrug off as just another one life’s challenges to be faced.
“Me First”: a world of delay, opacity, incompetence and unpreparedness, leading to public panic, overreaction and selfishness, the after effects of which linger for years.
We’ve had Spanish flu (1918-19), Asian flu (1957) and Hong Kong flu
(1968-69). Then we had SARS, bird flu and recently, swine flu. There is
also seasonal flu, which appears every winter and kills about 250,000
people annually, although this is often forgotten. The idea, “community
of anxiety”, was coined in 2004 by the writer, Ian McEwan, in Saturday, a
novel about events surrounding the Iraq war. A similar idea is
information pandemics. Both ideas describe the way fear and anxiety are
spreading throughout the world, fuelled primarily by the
interconnectivity of digital communications. It can start with a single
email, spread to a blog and end up on Twitter. The result is global
panic on an unseen scale and outbreaks are difficult to contain.
In
early May, the World Health Organization talked about the need to
stockpile food and water due to the swine flu outbreak and raised the
threat level to five out of a possible six. Meanwhile, airports were
installing thermal scanners and newspapers revelled in the story as it
grew more scary and spectacular. The whole world seemed to be running
for cover wearing a variety of (mostly useless) facemasks. Fear was
spreading fast, fed with a mixture of confusion and impotence. The
threat is real enough. The 1918 outbreak killed 20-50 million people in
less than 18-months while the Black Death in the 14th century wiped out a
third of the European population in just two years. Even the Asia and
Hong Kong pandemics killed about 1-2 million people apiece. But we are
confusing what’s possible with what’s probable. The reason is a
collective feeling – a mood if you like – that something big and nasty
is coming our way. This is partly because a string of events, from 9/11
and climate change to the economic collapse, have left us feeling unsure
about what’s next. It is possible that a real pandemic will
eventually emerge.
It will probably start in an overcrowded
Asian city and travel economy class on a jet to the US and Europe. We
may be able to contain it or we may not. The science surrounding such
things is uncertain. Interestingly though, there appears to be a sense
that we deserve things like this to happen to us. In some way, we are
collectively guilty (because we borrowed too much money or damaged the
planet with our selfish, materialist ways, perhaps) and we need to be
punished. There is also a warped sense of curiosity at play. What would
the world look like after a genuine pandemic? Would the death of 50
million people give everyone more food to eat? Another example of the
fear factor was the jet that flew low over New York in early May. People
automatically assumed another terrorist attack and panic whipped around
Manhattan like wildfire. It turned out to be someone taking photographs
but by then it was too late. And this, perhaps, is the point.
Information now flows around the world too quickly and there is not
enough time to properly react or to separate fact from opinion, anecdote
from analysis, or sensation from science. There is too much information
and much of it is unreliable.
Thanks to Web 2.0 the old
hierarchy of knowledge, where source related to trustworthiness and
reliability, has broken down. Furthermore, the people we used to trust
(scientists, politicians, religious figures) are now widely distrusted
so we ignore them. Swine flu is killing about 0.1% of those it infects;
the mortality rate for the 1918-19 variety was 2.5-5.0%. So very few
people have died so far. This could still change but I doubt it.
Nevertheless, the sense of impending apocalypse remains.
Ref: Sydney Morning Herald (Aus) 2-3 May 2009, ‘Fear fever’, J. Huxley. www.smh.com.au See also The Fourth Horseman: A history of epidemics, plagues and other scourges by Andrew Nikiforuk, Panicology by Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams and Risk: The science & politics of fear by Dan Gardner.
It’s interesting to me to see how the media, and hence the public, are responding to Coronavirus (I think that’s the correct way around, but it’s hard to say who’s leading who sometimes). The risk of death is remote (a mortality rate of between 0.7% and 3.0% currently depending on circumstances and location), which is almost nothing. Ebola had a mortality rate of 60%, SARS 10%. The numbers 0.7-3.0 are still significant if applied across a while population, but the response of the media, and hence governments and people, generally seems over the top.
I think that perhaps the reason for this might be the current narrative, which is doomsday apocalyse (think of climate change and species extinction in particular). It’s also got something to do with how we think about the future generally, which is logical but hugely unhelpful (we simply extrapolate from current data or conditions in a linear manner) and perhaps the fact that people are generally dreadful at working out real probabilities or understanding the impact of feedback loops, counter-trends or unexpected events.
And, of course, connectivity is fuelling everything. It’s spreading the virus, but it’s also spreading panic about the virus. News is travelling to fast to be properly analysed, fact checked or placed in proper context.
Anyway, as they say, my particular interest at the moment is how the current panic about Coronovirus might work with other anxities to create some kind of super-anxiety or mental collapse (shades of Future Shock – see After Shock). I eluded to this somewhat when I created my risk radar and spoke of unseen combinations of events and put Global pandemic alongside Loss of antibiotic efficacy, Mental health epidemic and Global financial system collapse. The thought was repeated on the list of global gamechagers on my map of mega-trends.
So what to do? I think the Stoics have it nailed. Worry about or do something about what you can influence, or control, and don’t worry or try to control about what you can’t. In the words of Seneca, “The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs on tomorrow and loses today.” Or, as he also put it, “You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours.” It will be what it will be.
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