“In light of evolving evidence, WHO advises that governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult, such as on public transport, in shops or in other confined or crowded environments.”

This is in stark contrast to their previous advice — issued just two months earlier:

“… the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks.”

As Tom Chivers points, out the UK government is also in the process of U-turning:

“…the UK government began by telling people they didn’t work, then ‘advising people to consider‘ using them in enclosed spaces, now mandating them on public transport.”

Late last week, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, wrote to the Prime Minister calling for mask-wearing to be made compulsory in shops.

So, battle-by-battle, the war for masks-for-all is being won. But it’s not over yet.

*

Go to a supermarket in the UK and the majority of people are not wearing masks. Prominent politicians are failing to lead by example — appearing maskless for photo-ops. Donald Trump, despite his own government’s advice, makes a special point of it.

Further reading

Donald Trump: from superhero to zero

By Tanya Gold

A wide range of commentators have declared their support for masks, from Polly Toynbee to Tom Harwood, but there’s no shortage of anti-mask contrarianism. For instance, last week, Toby Young retweeted this pearl of wisdom:

“On average, the gap in weave of (non-medical) cotton masks is around 1/10th mm. The virus is 1/10,000th mm, so roughly like trying to stop mosquitos with hula-hoops…”

A vivid image, but an incomplete one. The coronavirus is spread through what are delicately termed ‘respiratory droplets’ — i.e. bio-weaponised mucus missiles that are big enough to be impeded by an ordinary face mask. That’s especially true when they’re being propelled out of an infected, super-spreading individual who’s sneezing, coughing or otherwise breathing heavily.

Of course, were not talking about complete effectiveness here. Ordinary masks don’t provide the same degree of protection as medical-grade PPE — but then they don’t have to. At a population level, any significant reduction in R (the rate of transmission) can still make a difference — whether it’s in flattening the curve at the most dangerous stage of an epidemic, or crushing it when R drops below 1.

Any extra help is especially important when lockdown restrictions are lifted and there’s a risk of R rising above 1 again (as appears to be happening in America). Mask-wearing is of particular relevance at this stage, because unlike a lot of other social-distancing measures it is compatible with re-opening and re-mobilising the economy.

*

Yet, if that’s all true, why didn’t more governments adopt a masks-for-all policy from the outset — or, at least, from the start of lockdown? Why was the official guidance from the WHO and elsewhere decidedly unenthusiastic? Why is our own government’s U-turn still incomplete (masks required on public transport, but not yet in shops)?

The answers to these questions not only reveal a deep misunderstanding of risk at the highest levels, but also a fatal conceit in our culture of politics — and a childish self-centredness in the soul of modern man.

To begin with, risk. The main excuse given for not recommending masks was the lack of a conclusive evidence base. However, governments didn’t have proof that the lockdown measures that they did take would work either — but they went ahead with them anyway. Putting entire populations under house arrest? No probs! Pitching millions of people out of work? Needs must! Bringing whole industries crashing down? We’ll work it out later! But requiring people to wear a small piece of cloth over their mouths? No, for some reason, that was crossing the line. A measure with almost no downside risk, but a potentially huge upside in terms of saving lives and shortening lockdown was not only not taken, but actively discouraged.

Further reading

Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?

By Saloni Dattani

It is, of course, important not to react to one systemic risk by taking another systemic risk — for example, the disastrous error of trying to protect hospitals by moving potentially infected patients into care homes. Perhaps that’s why the WHO speculated at length as to what it called the “uncertainties and critical risks” of wearing masks. Among the scenarios floated were “self-contamination”, “diversion of resources from… hand hygiene” and “potential breathing difficulties”. But where was the evidence for any of that?

If there was a systemic downside of wearing masks, wouldn’t we have noticed it by now? After all, habitual mask-wearing in a modern setting is not a novel practice. It’s a long-established feature of 21st century life in a number of East Asian countries where masks are commonly used as protection against infectious disease and air pollution. Indeed, in the course of the current pandemic it quickly became clear that these countries have done a lot better than most of western Europe and North America in containing the spread.

As for the argument that mask-wearing might lead to a “false sense of security” (another WHO assertion), that is a question that could have been settled very quickly by the simple act of observing people. In fact, when researchers did observe they found that, if anything, the effect was in the other direction, i.e. mask-wearers taking more care than non-wearers. That’s not so surprising. The slight discomfort of wearing a mark, the deliberate act of putting one on and the sight of other people wearing them are all reminders of the pickle we’re in.

*

Speaking of the latest research, studies (e.g. here and here) are now coming in to confirm the common sense expectation that mask-wearing does indeed reduce transmission. The missing evidence base is missing no longer.

Still the question remains: why wasn’t common sense alone enough to prompt action on masks much earlier on? Nassim Taleb identifies numerous errors in the reasoning of those in power; not least mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence. With low-cost, low-risk measures like mask-wearing, the obvious thing to do is try them on the basis that they might work — because what have we got to lose?

Taleb has a long record of accusing the credentialed ‘expert class’ (and the decision-makers they serve) of having a poor philosophical understanding of risk — both epistemically and ethically. He has an equally long record of being proven right, including on the pandemic. He and his colleagues, Joe Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam were early to realise the seriousness of the threat posed by Covid-19, early to argue for lockdown measures and early to criticise the initial errors of the UK response.

Further reading

Why Antifragile is the perfect read for today's turmoil

By Peter Franklin

And yet while Taleb is right about the biases of the expert class, this doesn’t in itself explain why our system of government is biased to the expert class. In other words, as well as asking why the official advice was so negative about masks, we also need to ask why the decision-makers didn’t over-rule the experts and go ahead with masks-for-all on the basis of common sense.

It is sometimes said that the problem with common sense is that it isn’t common. But, in this case, it is precisely because it is. Unlike the hierophantic bestowal of official scientific advice, common sense doesn’t provide political cover if things go wrong. Furthermore, it tends to lend itself to the local and experimental. It requires epistemic humility on the part of our leaders — a willingness to admit what we don’t know and to own up to failure.

Unfortunately, our culture of politics, which systematically centralises decision-making — works in the opposite direction. Influence is exerted and reputations are made through the enacting of bold, confident, top-down solutions. Which is why the narrowness of the official expert advice that informs those plans is a feature not a bug of system.

*

But we can’t blame it all on our politicians. The resistance to mask-wearing is also cultural.

A lot of this is entirely understandable. To conceal one’s face in public — or cause someone else to do so — is a powerful statement. The controversy surrounding the Niqab and the Burqa is testament to that.

Face masks impede communication. Indeed that is one of the things that makes them effective — given what we know about how loud talking spreads the virus. The easing of lockdown will remobilise the economy, but with masks-for-all how we look and sound to one another will be transformed. Public spaces will fill with people again, but they will be weirdly silent, their smiles (and scowls) hidden away. It will, in its way, be more disconcerting than the deserted streets of deep lockdown — a cityscape of crowds without hubbub, faces without expression.

Further reading

How apocalyptic is now?

By John Gray

But it wouldn’t be forever. Indeed, as a price for accelerating the eradication of the epidemic — and for preventing an economically ruinous second wave — it is surely worth paying.

So, what’s stopping government from giving the order? Perhaps because the stakes are so high. If you think of most of the other things we’ve been universally required to do, there’s always been a bit of wiggle room. Unless you’re a public figure like Neil Ferguson or Dominic Cummings, the anonymity of modern life allows people to occasionally bend or break the rules with a low chance of detection, let alone punishment. Outside of our immediate circles, we don’t know who’s been washing their hands, keeping their distance or self-isolating should they need to. Masks, though, are different. Someone is either wearing one or they’re not. Both compliance and non-compliance would be immediately visible. Which is why a masks-for-all policy is such a high-profile test of a government’s authority (and, competence, should not enough masks he made available). 

The visibility of non-compliance is also what so sticks in the craw of civil libertarians — especially those who imagine their liberties to be ancient ones. I say “imagine”, but in some ways, they’re absolutely right. Our ancestors were allowed to do all sorts of things that we are not. At one time it was the right of every freeborn Englishman to throw the contents of his chamber pot out the window. He could spit in the street and no one cared. He could bait animals for ‘sport’, build a house without planning permission and, in later eras, drive a car without a licence… or being sober. Even in my own lifetime, one could still legally drive without a seatbelt, smoke on public transport or, in certain circumstances, beat a child with a weapon.

The history of civilisation is the history of regulation — the accumulation of rules that we are all expected to abide by for the common good. For all these impositions, we are not only safer, but fundamentally freer and happier too. Not that we admit it, of course. We seem to think that our comparatively carefree world is the result of us being able to do as we please, when in fact the opposite is true.

Mandatory mask-wearing would be a further catch-all imposition. Indeed, that may be the most effective thing about it  — the fact that it encompasses everyone, including super-spreaders. Personally, I’d be happy if masking-up while sick with a cold or the flu became a permanent norm, but the priority right now is killing off Covid without killing the economy. For most of us, wearing a mask would be a temporary inconvenience for a lasting victory.

Further reading

Why we should be worried about coronavirus

By Peter Franklin

It is therefore no surprise that when the folks at Our World in Data compared the media’s coverage (specifically, in the New York Times and The Guardian) of various causes of death with mortality statistics for the general population they found a mismatch. They also looked at causes of death through a third lens – online searches by the public.

Further reading

Don’t sweat the small stuff, or why the ‘New Optimists’ are only half right

By Peter Franklin

The findings are summarised on the site in an article by Hannah Ritchie:

“…around one-third of the considered causes of deaths resulted from heart disease, yet this cause of death receives only 2-3 percent of Google searches and media coverage… just under one-third of the deaths came from cancer; we actually google cancer a lot (37 percent of searches)… but it receives only 13-14 percent of media coverage…”

This is pretty much as one might expect. Specific incidences of death caused by a common disease do not generally make the news – except in the case of famous individuals.

As for online searches, one would expect the public to turn to ‘Dr. Internet’ if they have concerns about their own health or that of people they know – and, given the wide range of possible symptoms and warning signs associated with cancer, it’s not surprising that it prompts a disproportionate share of searches.

Then we come to the most dramatic findings:

“…the largest discrepancies concern violent forms of death: suicide, homicide and terrorism. All three receive much more relative attention in Google searches and media coverage than their relative share of deaths. When it comes to the media coverage on causes of death, violent deaths account for more than two-thirds of coverage in the New York Times and The Guardian but account for less than 3 percent of the total deaths in the US.”

Ritchie says that compared to what actually happens in real life, homicide is over represented in the newspapers by a factor of 31 and terrorism a factor of 4,000.

Ritchie does acknowledge what she calls the “very nature of news”. As the word makes clear, news is all about novelty and therefore the unusual, the sudden and the spectacular. This, she says, leaves most of us “with a skewed perception of the world; we think the world is much worse than it is.”

Further reading

I'm Lionel, I'm a news-aholic

By Lionel Shriver

Commenting on the Our World in Data study, Bill Gates was moved to tweet the following:

“I’m always amazed by the disconnect between what we see in the news and the reality of the world around us… we must fight the fear instinct that distorts our perspective.”

But is it right to pathologise what Ritchie calls a “strong bias for outlier events”?

Weighing in on the debate, Nassim Taleb slammed the “naive empiricists” who equate the future significance of a danger with how common it happens to be over a particular period of time.

The most egregious example of this fallacy is a cheap trick that’s often pulled by faux sophisticates in the commentariat. This is how it works: firstly, look up the stats for some rare, but crushingly banal, way to die – like falling off a ladder or accidentally drowning in a bathtub. Then, tell your readers that they’re still more likely to die that way than be knifed by a mugger or blown-up by terrorist. Then reassure everyone that the country is not, in fact, going-to-hell-in-a-handcart and that all is well in the liberal paradise. Finish with a condescending quip about Brexit voters – and you’re done. File that column, sit back and bask in the respect of your peers.

Taleb exposes the flaws in this ‘thinking’. He does so by distinguishing between two domains of probability, which he calls ‘Extremistan’ and ‘Mediocristan’. Terrorism is an example of a risk that belongs to Extremistan. It may, at present, be small – but it has the potential to become massively and unpredictably more significant.

A single act of terror can pitch a nation into a series of foreign policy disasters, as with 9/11 and the US. An escalating campaign of terror (and counter-terror) can bring fear and division to an entire society as in Northern Ireland during the Troubles; or, yet worse, develop into a full-scale, bloody civil war – as it did in Syria. Crime, too, poses potentially systemic risks. If it gets out of control, the harm is not just to the immediate victims, but everyday life and long-term prosperity across an entire neighbourhood, city or country.

Further reading

If you want to get ahead, take a risk

By Timandra Harkness

The same cannot be said of bathtubs or ladders. We may have the luck to live in a time and place where they kill more people than terrorists do, but the risks associated with their use belong to Mediocristan. This means that the most extreme scenarios really aren’t that extreme at all – society will not be rocked to its foundations by an uncontrollable epidemic of bathtub drownings, for instance.

Could it be that the general public has an instinctive sense of the risks that have the greatest potential to turn into catastrophe? If so, in pressing our buttons, the media is not whipping up scare stories – but acting as a means by which legitimate public concerns can be identified, amplified and pushed up the political agenda.

“A weird and disturbing change has come over the Conservative Party.

“I’m not talking about the raging divisions and defections over Brexit, or the fact it seems to be preparing to get rid of yet another leader — after all, civil war over Europe and regicide are longstanding Tory traditions.

“I’m talking about a much more unusual and unprecedented phenomenon: the fact that the Tories, both in government and more generally, seem to have stopped talking and thinking about economics.”

What Westlake goes on to say is certainly much more than a rant – in fact, it’s an essential read (especially if you happen to be a government minister).

Suggested reading

Ten vested interests the Tories failed to tackle

By Peter Franklin

There’s too much in it to unpack the whole thing in one go – so I’ll focus on what I take to be the core argument:

“To the extent that Number 10 has an interest in economic policy, it is the economics of ‘Erdington Modernisation’, that version of self-proclaimed One Nation Toryism associated with Nick Timothy, the PM’s former chief of staff best known for writing the Tories’ self-destructing 2017 manifesto.”

Erdington, by the way, is a working class district of Birmingham – which is England’s second city, and yet so far behind the capital in status that it’s become a symbol of the problem with our London-centric economy. When she became Prime Minister, Theresa May promised “an economy that works for everyone” – the core tenet of the Erdington approach:

“It’s the belief that British economic policy has spent far too much time and money on winners, and that the country would be both fairer and more prosperous if we diverted resources to the Rest…

“To use Nassim Taleb’s characterization, Erdington economic policy argues we should focus on Mediocristan — the average business, the average worker — rather than Extremistan — the upper (and lower) end of the distribution.”

Westlake sees the political sense in this: “most people are by definition normal – that’s statistics”. However, he questions the economics. He thinks we need to focus on the upper end of the distribution – the most successful businesses, institutions and cities. This is where you find the star players, the game changers, the champions who will maintain our relevance in a hyper-competitive global economy. Instead of trying to “fix the laggards, who have always been with us”, we should “help the next generation of world-beaters to grow”.

Westlake makes a powerful case (again, I urge you to read the whole piece.) However, I do think there’s problem with it. For a start, by “Extremistan”, Nassim Taleb does not mean the upper and lower ends of a statistical distribution – nor does “Mediocristan” refer to its middle. Rather, the labels refer to two entirely separate statistical realms.

In Mediocristan, the upper and lower ends are not very different from the middle. Consider, for instance, the distribution of human height – the very tallest people are not even twice as tall as people of middling stature. In Extremistan, however, one or both ends of a distribution deviate hugely from the mean. Personal wealth is a prime example – the richest people having thousands of times more money than the average person.

Suggested reading

Why Antifragile is the perfect read for today's turmoil

By Peter Franklin

In some ways, western economies are becoming more extreme. There’s a long-term trend toward market concentration (i.e. the biggest companies taking a bigger share of their sectors); pay differentials between executives and workers have widened; and the most successful businesses have become geographically concentrated in a handful of global cities (with extreme property prices to match).

You’d think that all this focus on the best and brightest would have resulted in a productivity boost. But, no – the general trend across the West is deceleration among the drivers of growth – a phenomenon which economists call secular stagnation (‘secular’ in this context meaning long-term). Westlake points out that in the UK,  “our disappointing productivity growth… over the last decade has not been the fault of the [long tail of low productivity firms], but of our best firms…”

Some people think that the laggards are holding back the leaders – with ultra low interest rates and government bailouts allowing so-called ‘zombie companies’ to stagger on, thus tying up capital and talent that could be more productively deployed elsewhere. But this is getting it backwards. If the leading companies were doing their job – i.e. developing genuinely innovative products – the laggards would be rendered obsolete. The leaders would do to the zombies what the automobile industry did to the horse-and-cart, or what the PC computer did to the also-ran computer formats of the 1980s. This is how they do business in Extremistan, with risk-taking frontier firms – most of which crash and burn, a few of which change the world.

Unfortunately, this is not the way that most western economies do business. If our leading companies can’t quite shake off a long-tail of inferior competitors, it’s because they’re not that much better themselves. Furthermore, their leading position might be less to do with any innovative edge and more to do with the unmerited benefits of bigness (which I explore here).

Suggested reading

Why low interest rates poison the economy

By Peter Franklin

Of course, it’s not that proper innovation and entrepreneurship have ceased altogether, just that there’s not nearly enough of it. Too often there’s no choice to make between Extremistan and Mediocristan because it’s Mediocristan as far as the eye can see. Simply choosing to back the biggest mediocrities is no way forward.

It would be great if we had politicians willing to face up to this problem. But then again, it’s a rather dangerous thread for them to be pulling on.

Although it has some defenders, the argument has, over the years, been slated on a number of grounds. Critics include Voltaire and Diderot, nearer to Pascal’s own time, to more recent thinkers such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose book Skin in the Game was cited by Giles Fraser in a recent article. Some argue that even if it works, it doesn’t answer the question of which religion to follow. Others, like Taleb, say it encourages the wrong kind of belief – faith without commitment, with no “skin in the game”. In short, it fails to be a persuasive proof of the need for faith.

The only problem is that Pascal never meant it to be that.

Suggested reading

Why God needs skin in the game

By Giles Fraser

Most of its detractors (and many of its defenders) make a very common mistake. They take it as an attempt by Pascal to convince unbelievers of the benefits of faith. But it isn’t.

As with any text, the Wager needs to be understood in the context of the work as a whole, as well as the fairly long section in which it is laid out. Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and physicist working at the cutting edge of scientific questions in his own age. He was also a deeply religious thinker. The Pensées were the notes Pascal made towards a book addressed to a very particular audience – a work that was never finished due to his early death.

Many think he had in mind the sophisticated “cultured despisers of religion” in France in the 17th century. Pascal knew many such libertins, who enjoyed philosophising, drinking and gambling. When he was younger and less religious, such friends would urge him to use his mathematical genius to work out the odds on bets they were thinking of taking on. Many of them were influenced by the hugely popular philosophy of Pascal’s older contemporary, René Descartes, thoroughly convinced of the power of human reason to master the world; some had gone beyond Descartes to argue that Christianity was illogical and therefore no rational person could believe it.

Suggested reading

More understanding of Christianity is useful but it's no substitute for more Christians

By Melanie McDonagh

Pascal’s beef with Descartes was that he didn’t understand people. Descartes’ idea of the thinking self (“I think therefore I am”) suggested that humans were entirely rational beings, motivated by and capable of cool level-headedness, making decisions on strictly logical grounds. Pascal thought this was nonsense. For him, our anxieties and desires are more powerful than our rationality. As he puts it in one vivid image:

“Put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.”

Our fears and emotions are more powerful than our rationality, our longings more influential than our logic.

So when it comes to the Wager, the whole piece is designed not to persuade these sophisticates to believe, but to reveal the reasons why they don’t believe. The argument really runs like this: “The wager on belief is a bet you have to make – you can’t choose not to – either God is real or he isn’t. And you say that you don’t believe on strictly rational grounds, but do you really? You like a bet, right? OK, then look at the odds on belief. If you bet on God not existing, you don’t actually risk losing much. But if you bet on God existing, you stand to gain a huge dividend.

So looking objectively and rationally at the odds on offer here, a betting man or woman would always bet on belief. But we both know that you don’t. Why? It’s not because you are being rational: it’s because belief is inconvenient; you would rather there was no God; it costs too much, and you just don’t want to believe.”

As Pascal puts it at the conclusion of this section of the Pensées: “At least get it into your head, that if you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions, since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so.”

It’s not that reason has no place – in fact Pascal argues that to exclude reason altogether is as big a mistake as to think that it is only reason that dictates our decisions. Yet only when we realise how it is our desires that influence what we choose to believe can we begin to make progress.

Suggested reading

Why has secularism got religion in its sights?

By Giles Fraser

The Wager was never meant as a cold, logical argument for belief in God. It is, in fact, the opposite: an argument designed to show that we are not the purely logical, rational beings we sometimes think we are.

For Pascal, God cannot be known simply in our minds, as the conclusion of a cogent philosophical argument, but by the heart and soul: “It is the heart that perceives God, and not our reason.” If, then, we are caught between our logic and our desires, how do we get out of this dilemma? For Pascal it is only by making the first step – by taking the risk, not of abstract belief, but of costly commitment: as he puts it “You want to be cured of unbelief? Become like one of those who now wager all they have … They behaved just as if they did believe.” For Pascal, there is no such thing as cost-free faith. Faith means sacrifice. The way to salvation is, in fact, only found by having skin in the game.

These days, the drinking and the gambling are still as prevalent as ever (just watch any advert at half time while watching sport on TV). When it comes to philosophising about God and belief, we are more likely to be influenced by Richard Dawkins than by Descartes. Those who follow that path tend to claim on strictly rationalistic grounds that science and faith cannot live together, that reason rules out religion.

Yet Pascal and his Wager remind us not only of the compatibility of scientific exploration alongside religious faith within an extraordinarily fertile mind but also that we are more complex than the rationalists would have us believe. Pascal’s Wager does not try to prove Christianity, or indeed any religion.

What it does tell us is that when deciding on the deepest questions of life and existence, we need to be mindful not just of our logic, but of whether we are simply convincing ourselves of what we would quite like to be true. As Pascal himself says: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

Given that we cannot know whether God exists, he argues, it is better to believe than not to believe. For to believe costs us very little, but offers the possibility of eternal life. Not to believe, however, risks eternal damnation. So, given we cannot know which position is true, we might as well believe – the upside to belief is so much more attractive than the downside to unbelief: heads you win, tails nothing lost.

I don’t know anyone who has actually been convinced by this argument. Nonetheless, it remains one of the most celebrated philosophical arguments for belief – and has been credited as one of the earliest examples of probability theory.

For a sustained take-down of Pascal’s position, pick up the work of the financial-markets-trader-turned-public-philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He’s a Greek orthodox Christian by background, and someone who understands belief – and probability – far better than Pascal himself.

As he sees it, there are two fundamental problems with Pascal’s Wager. First, as he puts it in his little book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes: “Those who think religion is about ‘belief’ don’t understand religion, and don’t understand belief.” And, second, because, without what he calls, as per the title of his most recent book, Skin in the Game, a wager such as Pascal’s is morally vacuous.

Suggested reading

Our modern parenting is making monsters

By Giles Fraser

As anyone seriously embarking on the season of Lent will know, the Christian injunction to believe is framed in terms of the instruction to share in the suffering of the cross. “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me”[1. Luke: 9.23]. “Belief”, then, is hardly the cost-free option that Pascal proposes. Indeed, as Taleb rightly suggests, to call this a “belief” – that is, a question of epistemology – seriously misunderstands the basis of Christian discipleship.

“Follow me” is the instruction. It is not an intellectual exercise. And it promises suffering and death, as well as eternal life. Pascal is wrong all ways round. So Taleb, as I read him, is as much a theologian as he is a philosopher of risk. What is so interesting, is the connections he makes between the two.

Taleb directs much ire towards those who take risks with other people’s lives or with other people’s money. Those people who, generally, sit in air-controlled offices, in the White House or the New York Times, arguing, for instance, for the invasion of Iraq, when they themselves will suffer no consequences for the course of action they propose. Other people will die for their mistakes, though.

Suggested reading

Why Antifragile is the perfect read for today's turmoil

By Peter Franklin

Likewise, Taleb excoriates those in the financial markets who trade with other people’s money, making huge profits if they succeed, and being bailed out by the tax payer if they fail. That, of course, was what happened in the financial crash of 2008. It showed that for those banks that were ‘too big to fail’, profits were privatised and losses were socialised. The villain of Taleb’s story is Bob Rubin, a man who received $120 million in compensation from Citigroup before the crash, and yet, when the bank was made insolvent, suffered absolutely no consequence for the decisions he made that led to the company’s downfall. Rubin had no skin in the game.

In Taleb’s story, no one should be too big to fail – not even God. And that, he reflects, is precisely the point of the incarnation. God becomes human to have skin in the game, quite literally. Incarnation – like chilli con carne – refers to meat; to the becoming flesh (carne) of the divine. And this means that even God is not separated from the consequences of his/her actions.

“The main flaw in Pascal’s wager,” writes Taleb, “is that belief cannot be a free option. It entails symmetry between what you pay and what you receive. So the skin-in-the-game rules that hold between humans also hold in our rapport with the gods.” The gods do not like cheap talk. And Pascal’s “belief” is cheap talk. As Taleb concludes: “Love without sacrifice is like theft (Procrustes). This applies to any form of love, particularly the love of God.”

I can think of no better reflection for the beginning of Lent. Following Christ is not some academic “belief”, it is having skin in the game.

Suggested reading

What Peterson shares with Pelagius

By Giles Fraser

A god that is invincible, beyond pain and death, is not a god worth believing in. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in a brilliant essay called Love’s Knowledge, writes about why Odysseus rightly rejects the advances of the goddess Calypso. Calypso falls for the heroic Odysseus and offers him infinite security on her island of perfect bliss. But he politely rejects her offer, preferring to set sail on the risky ocean to be reunited with his mortal love, Penelope.

Why, in ancient Greek literature, do the gods so often fall in love with human beings, Nussbaum asks. Because human beings can do things that the immortals cannot – they can suffer and die; not least, they can demonstrate love through risk for others, through self-sacrifice. “Greater love has no one than this,” as St John puts it[2. John 15:13], “that they lay down their life for their friends.”

What content can be given to divine courage if the gods are incapable of risking their very existence. Little wonder, then, that gods find human existence more attractive than that made possible by the Olympian security of their own kind. This is the reason, in Christian theology, that God becomes human in the person of Jesus Christ. And so subject to the power of death. Love. Skin in the game.

If nothing else, paradox provokes a deeper consideration of the related issues. Or at least it would if the modern mind was open to such forms of enquiry. Sadly we’ve become so trammelled by simplistic psuedo-rationality that even the mildest spurs to imagination are rejected as illogical. 

Here’s something else that might not make sense: my book of the year is by the aforementioned Mr. Taleb, but it’s not the book he published this year (the brilliant Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily life), but Antifragile: Things that Benefit from Disorder, which came out in 2013. The reason I’ve chosen the older book is not just because I love it and keep returning to it, but because of one of the key ideas featured in Antifragile: the Lindy effect.

Because we’re human we associate age with impending mortality. But for things not subject to a process of inevitable decay, the opposite tends to be true: the longer something has been around already, the longer it’s likely to survive into the future. Taleb calls it “‘aging’ in reverse.”

Books are a great example. The longer that a book has been in print, the greater the chance of it still being in print for years or decades to come. One year in print proves nothing; ten years shows staying power; a hundred and it’s probably a classic; and if it’s older than printing itself, then it’s a cultural cornerstone and quite possibly sacred.

This is why book reviews should be of older books – not the very oldest, because they speak for themselves, but those whose relevance is sufficiently enduring to require explanation. Furthermore, if a reviewer is re-reading and thinking about a book years after the first read, he or she might just have something worth saying about it.

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To my mind, Taleb is the greatest living UnHerdian – no contemporary thinker has done more to challenge the herd-like thinking of the economic, political and cultural elites. Taleb’s best-known work is The Black Swan, which argues that people are very bad at foreseeing extremely unlikely, but massively consequential, events. Because these ‘Black Swans’ are bound to happen sooner or later, it is the improbable and unpredictable that shapes human history, not the commonplace events that can be predicted.

What distinguishes modernity from the rest of history, however, is that because we now have the technical ability to predict the commonplace with considerable accuracy (e.g. short-term weather forecasts), we’re deluded into thinking that we can also foresee the events that really matter. Hence a banking system organised around sophisticated risk models that supposedly had us prepared for the worst that could happen.

Taleb was among the very few financial experts who recognised that the models were fundamentally flawed – and said so long before the credit crunch and the global banking crisis. Furthermore, as a trader, he put his money where his mouth was – betting against the prevailing wisdom of the financial markets.

He’s never said just how much money he made in the process, but it was enough for him to give up the day job and devote his life to philosophical enquiry. Antifragile is the result of those studies, but it isn’t a conventional work of philosophy – not in the modern academic sense, anyway. Thankfully, it owes a great more to the classical tradition, in that it is accessible, eclectic and useful.

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In fact, more than useful, it is indispensable. While his earlier books explained why extreme events are so hard to predict, Antifragile is about how to live in this fundamentally unpredictable world.

This is where his concept of ‘antifragility’ comes in. You might think that the opposite of ‘fragility’ is ‘robustness’, but things that are robust are merely immune to the harm that disorder does to things which are fragile. The complete opposite of fragility would apply to things that actually gain from disorder.

There is no word for this property in the English language, which is why Taleb has invented one of his own. He gives various practical examples of antifragility – one of the most important of which lies in the difference between mechanical and living systems. The latter are antifragile not only because they can repair themselves, but because in the process of doing so they often get stronger.

Think about the impact of exercise on the human body – in the short-term, individual muscle fibres break under the strain (hence the soreness that results from a workout), but as the muscles repair themselves the fibres multiply, increasing muscle mass and power.

Indeed, to avoid the stresses and strains of physical effort altogether is very bad for our health. It weakens the body and invites the Black Swan of catastrophic illness – an extreme shock from which the body might never recover.

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Much the same applies to the economy. In the years prior to the credit crunch, governments used cheap money policies to smooth out the business cycle – “no more boom and bust” as Gordon Brown once said. For a while it worked, growth was steady and recessions were avoided, but only at the cost of running up debts that hugely amplified the pain when the crunch finally came.

In a warning that is sadly just as relevant today, Taleb argues powerfully and persistently against the distorting effect of debt – that great attractor of Black Swans. He also argues that the normal ups-and-downs of the business cycle are in any case to be welcomed, not avoided. In order to be antifragile it is necessary that some parts of the economy are allowed to fail so that the whole can get stronger.

Taleb makes the appropriate nods to those who have made this point before him – in particular, Joseph Schumpeter and his idea of creative destruction. However, Taleb brings something new to the table: he takes a number of established ideas that will be well-understood and appreciated by conservatives (the real kind, not those lobbying on behalf of crony capitalism) and systematically relates them to his insight on the true nature of risk and uncertainty.

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As he repeatedly reminds us, it is the extreme probabilities – the Black Swan events – that matter. Simplistic models of risk concentrate on the most likely scenarios (i.e. the highest point on a bell curve of possible outcomes). Supposedly more sophisticated models take account of some of the more extreme possibilities – say, the one-in-a-hundred chances. Taleb, however, urges us to take into account the full range of possibilities contained within the ‘tails’ of the bell curve.

For some things, the tails don’t extend very far – for instance, the possible range of human life expectancies is limited on one side of the graph to zero years, and on the other to roughly 120 years. But in other cases – such as household income – at least one side of the curve is practically unlimited, extending far beyond the commonplace. Statisticians calls these ‘fat tails’ because they encompass such a wide spread of outcomes.

Because these fat tails tend to occur on only one side of the curve, the nature of risk in the real world is highly asymmetric – i.e. the worst that could happen is much more significant than the best that could happen and vice versa. For instance, exceeding the speed limit may get you to your destination a bit faster (modest upside) or it might get you killed (extreme downside). On the other hand, a canny investment in an exciting new start-up might see you lose an affordable slice of your savings (modest downside) or get you an early stake in the next Google (extreme upside).

Conventional policy making tends to focus on the most likely outcomes in any given scenario, yet it is the extreme events which change the world. Therefore our top priority should be to minimise our exposure to the extreme downsides (the negative Black Swans) and maximise our exposure to the extreme upsides (the positive Black Swans).

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The key to such a strategy is what Taleb calls “optionality”. In investment terms, an option gives you the right, but not the obligation, to pursue an opportunity. It therefore allows you to cut your losses if things don’t work out or maximise your gain if they do. Furthermore, because positive Black Swans (like their negative brethren) are uncommon and you can’t tell in advance where they’ll appear, you need to have the widest possible range of options.

Policy making that maximises optionality will therefore favour the small over the large, diversity over uniformity and localisation over centralisation. Of course, many other thinkers have come to similar conclusions. For instance, in a famous paper entitled ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, Friedrich Hayek argued that information is widely dispersed and thus can only be made use of though the free interaction of local actors as opposed to a single, central authority.

But Taleb shows us there’s more going on than local knowledge. While knowledge of the commonplace may well be local in nature, advance knowledge of the extreme events that make the most impact isn’t available anywhere. The strongest argument for decentralised, diversified decision-making is that it allows us to make lots of little investments in the hope that at least one of them will pay off big-time. In other words, localism isn’t just about getting smart, it’s also about getting lucky (and not leaving everything exposed to any particular instance of bad luck).

Looking at the great policy disasters of recent times, it’s telling that the approach taken by policy makers is diametrically opposed to Taleb’s ideas. Over and over again, we see governments betting the farm on projects with limited optionality and where the worst that can happen overshadows the best that can happen.

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The Eurozone, for instance, represented a single enormous investment in a scheme with a modest upside (reduced transaction costs) and an extreme downside (the ongoing Eurozone crisis). The deregulation of the banks was another example (profits for the few versus bail out costs for the many), as was the deliberate inflation of the property market (short-lived boost versus long-term damage to growth and housebuilding). Looking to the future one has to question mega-projects like HS2 (modest improvement to travel times versus spiralling costs) or the construction of nuclear power stations (ask the Japanese).

As this is a book review, I should say something about its style as well as its substance. So, a word of warning: the former will not be to everyone’s taste.

For a start you never quite know what’s coming next. The book is a patchwork of philosophy, economics, mathematics, lifestyle advice and autobiography. Alighting from one subject to the next, Taleb also switches between different modes of explanation – from graph to anecdote to polemic. There are snatches of history, literary allusions and fictional dialogues. In short it’s a riot (though not a mess). If you prefer the sort of book that behaves itself, proceeding from point to point in a straight line then Antifragile is not for you.

The book also places some demands on the reader. Not because of its language, which is far from turgid, nor because of its grounding in statistics and probability (all but the simplest maths is confined to a technical appendix). Rather, it is the structure of the argument that requires the reader’s full attention. By approaching his points from various tangents and angles, Taleb is showing that they apply not just to the world of finance but to other domains too. Moreover, by making the reader work, the book embodies its own advice. Physical effort strengthens the body and mental effort strengthens the mind.

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Finally, the reader needs to get on with the author as a person. For all of its patchwork quality, every part of the book is stamped with Taleb’s character – and he is not a man given to false modesty or to suffering fools (and knaves) gladly. Readers may or may not care for this sort of thing, but for me it was a breath of fresh air.

Those who were morally, intellectually and directly responsible for the economic calamities of the 2000s have mostly got away with it. Many are still in post – whether in government, business or academia – others enjoy comfortable retirements.  So why shouldn’t those who were right about the banks and the Eurozone and all the other disasters say ‘I told you so’? They have every right to their anger.

For the most part, however, this is not an angry book. Rather it is a demolition of the false certainties that still bedevil the modern world.

Antifragility is neither Left-wing nor Right-wing in its politics, but is an important addition to – indeed a development of – conservative thought. Conservative philosophers have long recognised the limits of human rationality, but their suggested response to this reality has tended towards the passive, bordering on the defeatist.

Taleb’s great achievement is to bring a more active principle into play. Fully aware of the uncertainties of human existence, he nevertheless shows us that we can position ourselves against them – shielding ourselves against the downside, but open to the upside.