According to Wikipedia, a black-swan event is “an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalised after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.” The Antiplanner’s policy brief about black swans was condensed into an article in the Federalist this week.
Almost as if in response, Nassim Taleb, the person who coined the term “black-swan event,” says he doesn’t believe this pandemic is a black swan. Why not? Because he predicted it!
He might have predicted that a pandemic would eventually take place. Tom Clancy predicted that someone would fly an airplane into important buildings in the United States. The Weather Service predicted that Hurricane Katrina would hit the Gulf Coast. Many, including the Antiplanner, predicted that the housing bubble of 2006 would lead to a financial crisis.
But no one predicted exactly when or how this pandemic and the government response to it would devastate our economy. No one predicted that the Twin Towers, plus one more tower, would be demolished on September 11, 2001. No one predicted that Hurricane Katrina would lead to the failure of the levees protecting New Orleans, killing well over a thousand people. No one predicted that Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, and numerous other banking firms would be put out of business by the 2008 financial crisis.
In other words, Taleb is just “inappropriately rationalizing the pandemic with the benefit of hindsight.” Thus, he himself is proving that the pandemic is a black swan.
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It doesn’t really matter what Taleb thinks we should call it. All of these events were unexpected and they all sent major shockwaves through our economy. We need to find ways to make our economy more resilient in the future.
In an amazing turnabout for someone who was elected as a Tea-Party conservative, Florida Senator Marco Rubio argues that we should achieve such resilience by turning our economy over to the politicians. These are the same politicians who have been guiding us so well through the current pandemic (in case you don’t recognize it, that’s sarcasm). Needless to say, Rubio appears to have lost his marbles.
Fortunately, we don’t have to consider that choice when it comes to transportation. The vast majority of Americans have already decided to rely on the mode of transportation that happens to be most resilient. The main thing government needs to do is get out of the way.
That means ending subsidies to transportation and, if the transportation is government owned, letting the agencies manage their assets solely out of user fees. We can best preserve our transportation resiliency by ending efforts to get people to become dependent on transit or otherwise stop driving while maintaining and, where it can be funded out of user fees, expanding the capacity of our highway system.
When is a crisis not a crisis?
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When the facts come in showing that fatality rates are in line with or only slightly higher than the flu.
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https://reason.com/2020/04/20/l-a-county-antibody-tests-suggest-the-fatality-rate-for-covid-19-is-much-lower-than-people-feared/
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“the new study suggests the true fatality rate among everyone infected by the virus is somewhere between 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent…The lower end of that range is about the same as the estimated fatality rate for the seasonal flu.”
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Told you so.
These are the same politicians who have been guiding us so well through the current pandemic (in case you don’t recognize it, that’s sarcasm).
No argument. Europe/Canada/US death rate per million population:
Belgium 585
Spain 482
Italy 423
France 326
United Kingdom 282
Netherlands 249
Sweden 211
Switzerland 182
Ireland 164
United States 154
Portugal 83
Denmark 70
Germany 67
Austria 59
Canada 58
It would be interesting to plot these numbers against the proportion of the population using a subway and/or bus instead of a private car.
I Taleb is talking more in the arena of statistics as you begin, Randal. And as such, a full counting of events statistically would include past flu/virus outbreaks. So an accurate statistical accounting would include such event in projecting forward. So, I understand where Taleb is coming from…it’s a White Swan not as much a black swan.
I think our next White or Black Swan event in Oregon could very likely experience is more frequent occurring rolling black outs of our electric utility services. And here it is the case of our politicians now in charge and over the past decade pushing the Northwest grid to rely on more intermittent producing electric power sources such as utility solar farms and wind turbine farms while they shut base load (around the clock) central power plants. Another factor in this rude awakening is these new power sources are more scattered and long distance transmission oriented (roof top solar is chump change and in most cases is still wired to the distribution utility grid). And when there are forest or wild fires guess what happen just recently….our Oregon’s executive branch decided to adopt California’s latest transmission black out policies for forest fires and wild fires.
I guess the statistics should pick this up from history to project the possibility forwards. As the government is very foolish now as in the past. For instance, natural gas fuel shortages in the Northeast back in the 70s caused by federal price controls on natural gas production and supply.
The Northwest Power Planning and Conservation technocrats are even raising the specter of electric supply outages in the Northwest as coal plants and natural gas plants are shuttered.
The word just hasn’t gotten to the Governor’s office it seems yet and even if it did, the train is already left the station for going “Green.” I guess we should watch the latest Michael Moore documentary called the “Planet of the Humans.” I guess it doesn’t paint such a benign picture of these supposed “green” power sources.
I say this out of respect, just delete this post. It’s a naked doubling-down that betrays a core misunderstanding, an ignorance, on black swans.
The one positive benefit of the Wuhan virus has been it’s exposure of what were ALREADY predicting.
– The will to impose authoritarian experiments on the US public.
– More so, we are now aware of the Ruling class transgressions of selling out the country to China. China owes its faster than expected rise as a world power to the transfer of American jobs, technology, capital, and business acumen to China. While libertarian journalists like Stossel have defended outsourcing for years, What justification have they if that location to instill so much investment in a country we know
– is an authoritarian regime
– has an ATTROCIOUS modern day human rights record
– Is largely exempt from economy crushing environmental laws
– is working with firms on surveillance technology
– Militarily expanding international waters
The Pandemic has exposed the “Ruling class” of wealth coddling, perpetual politicians.
The Imperial College in London, came out with a study projecting 2.2 million Americans would die if no mitigation took place or 1.1 million if an unprecedented societal shutdown were imposed. Then revamped their calculations, with estimates scaled back 90%. NEVER the less it was catalyst for incorporating total dominion and suppression of our civil liberties.
While the US public has long been suspicious of Chinese influence in America, the virus has exposed for all to see the extent of our reliance on what’s a global adversary for necessities such as medical and pharmaceutical products. If they could hoard or cut us off of significant percentage of essential medical supplies during peacetime, imagine what they could do 100% during a conflict.
Investigative reporter Lee Smith has an excellent analysis of how this corruption evolved
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/lee-smith-china-coronavirus-1