Don’t blame the black swan for this pandemic
Some say the Covid-19 pandemic came out of the blue, a disaster no-one could have predicted. In truth, the world had plenty of warning, writes Sue de Groot
In the torrent of coronavirus information and misinformation that pours down on us daily, some analysts have floated the idea that this pandemic is “a black swan”. Mathematician Tom Maydon, head of data science and credit at SA-based risk-forecasting company Principa, explained the phenomenon: “There was a Latin phrase used in ancient times to express scepticism: ‘You’ve got more chance of finding a black swan.’ In Europe at the time, every swan was white, so it meant the equivalent of ‘when pigs fly’. “After Europeans discovered that black swans did in fact exist, the expression didn’t really work anymore, but it is still used in economics to represent a very unlikely but not impossible event. “We prepare for what will happen based on what is happening now. There are generally seven-year or 10-year cycles economically and we prepare for the downturns. But we should also be preparing for very unlikely heavy occurrences, like a Covid-19 event.”
The expression “black swan” was brought back into vogue by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese-American academic, economist, mathematician, statistician, risk analyst and author whose 2007 book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, caused almost as much of a splash as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens did seven years later.
The difference between the two books is vast, however. Where Harari explains human behaviour based on what has gone before, Taleb explains what might never happen based on what (mostly) has never happened.
Taleb’s book describes a black swan event in terms of three criteria: it is unpredictable, it has a massive impact, and it is explained and rationalised only after it has occurred.
In Taleb’s words: “First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme ‘impact’. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”
Some of these things might seem applicable to the Covid-19 pandemic. In an article published in the Mail & Guardian on Wednesday, Roberto Bocca and Harsh Vijay Singh, both from the World Economic Forum’s “Shaping the Future of Energy and Materials” project, write: “Over the course of the past few months, we have been up against a lowprobability, high-impact catastrophe of global proportions.
“The speed, scale and intensity of the Covid-19 pandemic caught us off guard, necessitating the reallocation of resources and a collective conviction towards limiting the extent of the damage, and restoring normalcy to the economy and to society as soon as possible.
“Covid-19 has proven to be a ‘black swan’ event, threatening to undo the gains from the longest period of economic expansion in history.”
Their observations may be sound, but Taleb, the father of swans, would disagree with their classification. In an interview with Bloomberg Television on March 31, Taleb said he was irritated about the black swan label being “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us”.
In the same interview he reminded the US that he, Bill Gates and many others widely and repeatedly warned of the pandemic in January 2020. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb said.
In a piece for The Conversation this month, Glenn McGillivray, MD of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction in Canada, also questions whether the coronavirus is a true black swan event. “The danger of making an occurrence like the Covid-19 outbreak appear to be astronomically rare is that we will treat it as such and fail to prepare for the next pandemic. What’s more, those accountable for this preparation will dismiss their blatant failures because of the perceived exceptional nature of the event,” McGillivray writes.
He quotes a 2018 research study which concluded that “there is greater than a one in four chance of a pandemic occurring. Carrying the odds over 50 years means there is almost a 40% chance of a global outbreak.”
As McGillivray says: “The subtitle of Taleb’s book is ‘the impact of the highly improbable’, but an event like Covid-19 is not all that rare. Indeed, history is replete with such events, there have been numerous warnings from many sources, and the mathematical odds of an occurrence are not all that remote. With pandemics, it is not really a question of if, but usually when.”
Since the outbreak of SARS, the disease caused by a coronavirus variant that affected 26 countries in 2003, scientists have been predicting more zoonotic (transmitted by animals) diseases. But evidence of epidemics and how they have been handled goes way further back.
Writing for The Conversation this week, University of Cape Town professor of archaeology Shadreck Chirikure discusses how ancient civilisations dealt with such events.
“We know that the damaging impact of epidemics prompted the abandonment of settlements at Akrokrowa in Ghana during the early 14th century AD,” Chirikure writes. And “about 76 infant burial sites at an abandoned settlement that now forms part of the Mapungubwe World Heritage site in the Limpopo Valley of SA suggest a pandemic hit the people living there after 1000 AD. “Archaeological and historical insights also expose some of the strategies that societies adopted to deal with pandemics. These included burning settlements as a disinfectant and shifting settlements to new locations. Social distancing was practised by dispersing settlements.”
As Chirikure points out: “Humans have a propensity to relax and shift priorities once calamities are over. Data collected by archaeologists that show how indigenous knowledge systems helped ancient societies in Africa deal with the shock of illness and pandemics can help remind policymakers of different ways to prepare modern societies for the same issues.”
This delving into the past shows, says Chirikure, that “social behaviour is the first line of defence against pandemics. It’s essential this be considered when planning for the latest post-pandemic future.” Kenyan professor of pharmacy Sonak Pastakia, also published by The Conversation on Thursday, touches on the difficulties of understanding something we don’t yet know enough about. “When there are gaps in information, there are often competing forces seeking to fill them. Some may be based on scientific inquiry; others may be unsubstantiated opinions. They may all be trying to allay the fears of an anxious public. This conflict of explanations played out during the Ebola outbreaks in
West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the global HIV epidemic. “Covid-19 differs significantly from HIV and Ebola, but the potential consequences of having a misinformed public are similar. And much can be learnt from earlier epidemics to ensure that the same mistakes aren’t repeated.”
These observations back up Taleb’s claim that we are not living through a black swan event. But either way, we were caught with our pants down. As Maydon says: “We know the black swans could happen but we never properly prepare for them.”
Taleb insists we have the capacity to understand and positively act upon such things as randomness, probability and uncertainty.
As we have progressed as a species, our ability to find information (and misinformation) on anything, anywhere, at any time, seems to have deadened original thought. No matter how many clichéd motivational gurus tell us to “think outside the box”, we stubbornly resist this impulse and cling to what we are told about what other people claim to know.
Rational scientific thought is all good and well — in fact there’s not nearly enough of it around — but its one disadvantage is that it limits us to an examination only of existing evidence. Our understanding of the world is based on knowledge of things that have already happened. Speculation about things we have no proof or experience of does not belong in the scientific model. Taleb disputes this.
In an essay published in 2018, Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic emphasises the importance of Taleb’s work.
“His view is that only systems that have been created by a long process of tinkering (that is, evolution) have sufficient resilience to withstand black swan events,” Milanovic writes.
“Whether because we are tired of grand systems or because our knowledge has been parcelled due to the way knowledge is created and disseminated in modern academia, very few people are able to create systems of thought that go across multiple disciplines and display internal coherence.”
As the blurb for The Black Swan puts it: “We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world.”
The Covid-19 catastrophe might still legitimately be called a black swan — not in its potential to have been predicted and planned for, but in how it has shaken us out of our complacency and made us think beyond the unchanging monotony of what we thought we could expect.
The pandemic may have been predictable. The way it has forced us to look head-on at poverty, inequality and destitution, things previously pushed aside into our peripheral vision, was not.
What we do about these things will define our future.
The pandemic may have been predictable. The way it has forced us to look head-on at poverty, inequality and destitution, things previously pushed aside into our peripheral vision, was not