The Spitting Fog of Uncertainty

Nobody can really take credit for having solved a problem that never happened. Any attempt at it drags you into the realm of non-existent hypotheticals and becomes moot the moment you open your mouth. This is the position leaders around the world find themselves in when trying to fight this pandemic. It doesn't matter how informed, intelligent, prescient our leaders might (or might not) be, they face the same fog of uncertainty when trying to predict the future while making decisions to fix a problem this complex.

For better and worse, we're equipped with minds that can only draw on history to construct patterns when trying to face the future. And in a Bayesian dance, all we can aspire to do is to tinker with our course of action as that fog of uncertainty chooses to spit the next piece of evidence at us. There is no other way. Leaders (simple humans* that they are) fall prey to the same Law of Small Numbers; forced to take action in the face of clouded, small, and (many times) compromised data, drawn from an infinitely complex dynamic reality. But they are the deciders, after all, and decide they must. The cost of inaction is just too high to contemplate. They are there to act and people expect them to.  

A very ungrateful position indeed. This pandemic is showing the cruelness of this dilemma in stark relief: 

1. Shut down too soon and you will have killed the economy. Few people die and it will have all seemed the economic collapse was for nothing --unjustified, even. 
2. Shut down too late, trying to better ascertain information in order to react appropriately, and you're suddenly a shithole country. Too many lives lost at your hands because, of course, you're the leader and your job is to act.

Narratives abound as to what should have been done (opinions poured, of course, after reality has set in), chastising each and every government or the world. Like those saying we should have shut down way earlier at the thought of a big catastrophe being merely probable. For them, we also should have collapsed the world economy with Ebola (or with H1N1) because the probability of a health system collapse was latent then too. Or those who perennially advocate rooting out leverage and build redundancy. In other words, never allow for projects to occur with borrowed money so a shutdown like this one doesn't collapse the economy. 

Or my favorite: the monday morning quarterbacks. Those who imply this wouldn't have happened if only the US medical epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency hadn't been fired: 

“If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster.”

              --Bao-Ping Zhu, Chinese American who was the medical epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency from 2007 to 2011, talking about the July 2019 dismissal of Dr. Linda Quick from that position.

Right. As if a virus this contagious and genetically successful could be stopped in this hyperglobalized world once unleashed. If only that one whistle blower had alerted the US soon enough (BTW, the W.H.O. did alert 1 month before the first known case at the time) none of this would have happened. You know for sure how history would have played out if a single person working in China had alerted governments around the world. Of course. 

What pure, "heroic" positions to take. Virtue (and costless) signalling. Somebody please tell them about outcome bias. Yeah, let's collapse the economy at the discovery of every new disease. Let's unwind the entire financial system --delever-- in order to achieve resiliency. Worthy goals indeed. But first I'd like them to please illuminate us as to how do they really intend to abolish banking, for example. And to do so without sending us back to the 1100's. As much as we can agree that financialization is a problem for inequality (and for growth as of late), we can't deny the positives of finance in the history of civilization. Sure, pointing out that the entire system is an edifice resting on money that can be yanked at any moment --or worse, that it's based on pieces of paper (fiat money) that are intrinsically worth nothing-- will undoubtedly garner these "truth tellers" hordes of conspiracy-inclined fans looking for a community to belong to in these lonely times. But one thing is to point at a problem and advocate for burning this whole thing down. Another is to offer a concrete path to do it.

• How about reducing, restricting, or downright abolishing the tax deductibility of debt interest? (you know, the very reason overleverage --and therefore fragility-- occurs in the first place)

• How about restricting or flat out forbidding stock repurchases? (you know, the gimmick that artificially inflates stocks --and exacerbates inequality-- so executives can pay themselves handsome bonuses)

• How about allowing capital investments' full tax deductibility? (you know, so companies are incented to actually spend on brick and mortar projects that actually employ people)

Yet the cacophony focuses on yelling that every decision made was the wrong one. The US recovery plan is a fantasy. Germany will never lead Europe. The bailout went to the wrong people. I could go on but you get the idea. We somehow expect leaders and experts to be decisive, infallible, and guide us through the pandemic unscathed. Except that is not how things work. Expertise (and science in general) is built through an iterative process of trial and error. People building on somebody else's idea. The process itself implies a sort of cluelessness, and humility, and team playing, and learning from mistakes --even at the highest academic levels-- that we as society somehow refuse to see. But no. We want the cure yesterday. We want our leaders to emit resounding edicts that are not contradicted by subsequent evidence, and that miraculously and flawlessly take us back to normality.

What an unfathomably unreasonable** expectation to have.

The moment we realize that they are just winging it (because in the face of a problem this immensely complex there's no other way to do it, really) that's the moment we will demand a little bit less of them***, and a little bit more of us.

Let's just accept (for now) that all is left for us to do is wait for that fog of uncertainty to spit the next piece of evidence at us, so we can make the best decisions ourselves.

Until the next piece of evidence comes.

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*   Does not include certain leader who advocates injecting yourself with bleach.
* * What is not unreasonable, however, is to expect for a leader to at least not advocate for people to kill themselves by injecting themselves with bleach.
* * * Still demanding for leaders to not advocate injecting yourself with bleach, though.