The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

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, sm...

9/11 changed our way of life. It eroded our liberties. The Patriot Act made us slaves to a new reality in which we now gladly accept to be taken pictures that penetrate our clothes by the TSA with the sole objective of confirming we will not hijack our plane and slam it into a landmark. COVID19 will erode our liberties too. Just like 9/11 makes us willfully pose naked in exchange for the right to fly, COVID19 will eventually and make us gladly share our location to cross-reference it with healthcare databases to know if we've been exposed to infected people in exchange for the right to walk into a restaurant, a stadium or visit grandma at the nursing home. Just like life on the streets went on after 9/11 --it in a slightly different way-- life will go on on the streets after COVID19 --in a slightly  different way. The change in the world of economics will be more pronounced, though. The stock market represents the present value of the cash flows to equity, not...