Nate Silver’s compelling new book, Living on the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, is ostensibly about mathematical risk, and how it can be understood and used to benefit society accordingly. But I think it’s more about something else: the way we live now. It’s the book Trollope might have written if he had spent his life not as a post office employee but gambling, reading libertarian philosophers and hanging around on the underbelly of 4Chan and Reddit.

The first thing to understand about Silver, best known for his polling website FiveThirtyEight, is that politics does not come naturally to him. As he tells us: “I played poker professionally before I ever wrote a word about politics or built an election model. I still feel more at home in a casino than at a political convention.”

From this starting point, Silver guides us through his world, a particular group of people who he describes as living in “the River”. Poker players, he explains, love water metaphors, and the River is full of “tributaries and niches” inhabited by various types who have indeed spent their lives in the underbelly of the internet and, most importantly for Silver, in casinos. Often, they have played poker for huge sums of money. But the River also has “a canon of influences and ideas”. These range from “game theory and Nash equilibria to expected value and marginal utility” and various other things you have only dimly heard of.

These are people obsessed with numbers, especially ideas of probability so important to games like poker (the book’s first section is all about gambling). This has several effects, not least that it all makes you live a certain way. River people like Silver are “EV maximizers” (“expected-value maximizers”): Rivermen (and, as Silver points out, the River’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly men) take an analytical, strategic approach to gambling, investing and other aspects of life, trying to calculate the most optimal “play” in any given situation. This leads them down some curious paths, not least when Silver considers whether it’s “EV maximizing” to have fries with your sandwich or opt for the healthy side salad. “It might,” he concludes, “depend on how good the fries are.”

For the River, sacred places are not Harvard Yard or the Capitol, but Las Vegas, a “shrine to risk-taking, excess, progress, and capitalism”. All of this is, of course, an affront to what Silver calls “the Village”, which “consists of people who work in government, in much of the media, and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly Left-of-centre politics associated with the Democratic Party.” It is, in other words, the River’s nemesis.

See what’s happening here? Almost all that the Village, shorthand for the established elites, has traditionally prized is viewed by the River with scepticism, not least elite higher education. And this is probably no surprise. It’s hard to think of places that would be less welcoming to Rivermen. More than this, if the River esteems poker players, hedge funders and venture capitalists (gamblers of a different stripe), its emperors are Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk — all college dropouts (Musk, admittedly, only at postgraduate level).

What emerges is by now familiar: suspicion of “experts” or “elites” — and the desire to disrupt, or more correctly, take an axe to them. Confrontation is unavoidable. As Silver writes: “Harvard is the grand cathedral atop the hill — there is no more quintessentially Village institution.” So, when hedge funders such as Bill Ackman, rightly enraged by Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tawdry failures to condemn calls for genocide against Jews as hate speech, led the successful drive to remove her, it was “a symbolic coup” for the River. (“Want another sign that the Village and the River are explicitly at war?” Silver asks. “The New York Times’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.) VCs, Tech titans, data scientists, hedge funders — these are the master-gamblers of Silver’s universe. As he concludes: “The quants won… We’re living in their world.”

Naturally, this can be problematic. First off, revolutionaries almost always curdle into the despised elites they worked so hard to overthrow. Considering the market dominance of Venture Capital firms, Silver concedes that “if success is concentrated only among a few elite firms… to the point where they essentially can’t lose, then VC is becoming more and more like the incumbent institutions that Silicon Valley would deign to disrupt”. The Ivy League’s elite capture doesn’t disappear; it’s merely replaced by that of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Google and Tesla.

And who are these people? Well, many of them are just Riverman who hit the jackpot. Elon Musk may be a first-rate engineer and businessman, but he’s also an example of what happens when an incel makes $200 billion.

Back in the day, to amass a fortune as an industrialist or oil baron, you had to at least deal with people. Now, the Masters of the Universe are more comfortable with code than conversation. A few years ago, I watched Mark Zuckerberg launch the metaverse, which he did while performatively “chatting” with a grinning — and to my mind clearly terrified — young woman. It was just weird.

Silver understands this. “In the River, it’s common to find people, like Elon Musk or the poker player Daniel ‘Jungleman’ Cates, who self-identify as having Asperger’s syndrome or autism,” he writes. “It’s also common to hear people refer to themselves or others with terms like ‘Aspie’… Depending on the context, this may be derogatory, but it isn’t always so.” For the River, this is more of a cultural marker than a medical diagnosis. What the mainstream views with suspicion or does not understand becomes a source of pride. What it prizes, like Ivy League universities, the River eschews.

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The problem with gambling and risk is that, in irresponsible hands, it can be catastrophic. Silver tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-king turned felon. SBF, he writes, is “a nerdy, overconfident, Adderall-popping, video-game-playing, youngish white guy who has a severe gambling problem and is probably somewhere on the autism spectrum”. This makes him “a common typology” for the River. But he is also a crook, which Silver well understands. SBF’s problem was that he could mouth all the platitudes about EV, Effective Altruism, Rationalism and all other River obsessions — one consequence of reading this book is that I finally understand Dominic Cummings’s blogs — but it made no difference. It’s not even that he didn’t understand risk: he just didn’t care.

So why did so many stats-literate, data-munching, probability-obsessed altruists and tech bros fall under his spell? Once more the answer centres on ideas about the way we live, or rather the way the River seeks to live, and how it will ultimately always fall short of its loftiest aspirations. You can try to game all aspects of life, seek out the EV in every situation, calculate the odds, run your models and algorithms, but in the end, you remain (for the moment at least) irreducibly human. In the words of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz when assessing the SBF disaster: “It must have been the cult of personality. I guess it’s the only explanation.”

And it’s sometimes the only explanation elsewhere, too. It’s no coincidence that gambling, geopolitics and war all centre on the effective calculation of risk. Of course, there are vast and obvious differences between them in terms of cost, scale and repercussion; not least because risk in gambling is typically confined to the realms of chance and individual choice, while geopolitics involves a vastly greater degree of multifaceted interaction and its consequences can be global.

But there is a similarity too: if many of today’s finest minds are gamblers, history has thrown its greatest thinkers at geopolitics. And even when the stakes are life and death, when the players are so various, the same patterns persist. The cult of personality moves history — and it does so repeatedly. The River may have given us SBF, but geopolitics gave us Mao and Stalin and Putin. This is the price of being human, and it will continue to be so. You can bet on it.

I am reminded of a trip through Eastern Europe that my wife and I took in 1981. In Yugoslavia one day, we planned to catch a bus in the late morning. The bus and driver were there but the departure time came and went. After an hour we knocked on the station window and the two or three functionaries behind the glass barely glanced up from their hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches. The other passengers remained uniformly inert, neither requesting nor receiving any explanation for what turned into a two-hour delay. It would take years of small humiliations to make a formerly free people this compliant, but that seems to be the goal of the vast coalition of governmental, corporate, academic, cultural, philanthropic, and media powers that has just now fused and hardened, right before our eyes, into an ominous social monster.

There is a common playbook for technocratic control of recalcitrant populations. The Biden administration employs the same siege tactics of declared exigency, deception, division, and intimidation that corporatist progressives used to destroy my former university — Tulsa — two years ago.

After a Left-wing billionaire engineered a hostile takeover of the institution, it was announced that we faced serious crises of finance and accreditation. Faculty were subjected to mandatory training sessions and a blizzard of futile paperwork. The supposedly “data-driven” administration ignored or manipulated information that conflicted with their hidden purposes. While preparing a comprehensive academic review of our department, I learned that the provost had already received the program review committee’s recommendation that our majors in philosophy and religion be eliminated.

The general idea was to overwhelm and exhaust potential opponents of the university’s plan to gut the liberal arts. Surprised by strong pushback, the administration stirred up staff animosity against faculty critics of the restructuring, who were publicly vilified, monitored, and in some cases (including my own) subjected to costly and time-consuming disciplinary actions.

I needn’t belabour the obvious comparisons with the current state of our American union, which has suffered its own hostile takeover. I note rather that the logic of 21st-century technocratic despotism was spelled out long ago in Plato’s Republic. In that dialogue, a class of self-styled experts — the philosopher-kings and their academically-trained ministers — considers its exclusive claim to a science of politics as a title to rule. Contemptuous of what they regard as the ignorant many, they treat their fellow citizens as subjects to be manipulated, and for reasons Matthew Crawford suggested in his essay on the new public health despotism.

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They do so first, because persuasion takes time and effort and is less efficient than other available methods for achieving the desired results. In a democratic republic, this is a fundamental corruption of power. Second, because the notion that governance is an applied science or techne encourages the idea that human beings are basically raw materials to be shaped and stamped, like blanks at the Denver mint. Left unchecked, the state’s fundamentally idolatrous desire to coin young souls exclusively in its own image leads to the destruction of the family. The Attorney General’s attempt effectively to criminalise parental veto over public school curricula is a step in this direction. And third, because technocratic elites are inclined to regard the unsophisticated many as cognitively impaired. In the Beautiful City of the Republic, the rulers’ medicinal lies are justified on the ground that one wouldn’t give weapons to madmen. Just so, Dr Fauci’s supposedly noble lies about Covid presuppose that Americans are too sick to be entrusted with the truth.

It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which the therapeutic idiom of bureaucracies has taken hold in United States. (Here again, the University of Tulsa was ahead of the curve, having installed a safe-space affirming psychiatrist as president in 2016.) It is no coincidence that expressions of the manly confidence, candor, and “masculine independence of opinion” that Tocqueville saw as essential to the health of a democratic republic are increasingly likely to be condemned as “toxic”, a term that tries to square the circle by implying that the problem is simultaneously one of social disease and moral depravity. But this is yesterday’s news.

Tyrants have always attacked the political immune system of the people. Fearing spirited assertions of free thought, ancient Greek ones were known to close gymnasiums and ban philosophical discussion. At that time medicine was unsophisticated, and the psychiatric imprisonment of political opponents was not yet possible. Things have not gone so far in our country, but the identification of unorthodox speech and even of silence with violence — itself a symptom of a contagious political madness — serves the same purpose.

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Such tactics may be effective in the short term, but progressivist technocratic despotism is disastrous as a long-term political strategy in the United States. It will either be decisively repudiated or do great (and perhaps irreparable) harm to the country. For it betrays a fundamental ignorance not only of what one might call the physics of democratic republicanism, but of the unique nature of the American political experiment.

Plato again illuminates matters. In the Republic, Socrates compares individual souls and political communities to spinning tops. This is a rich and suggestive image. Those short-lived wanderers we played with as children, setting them in motion like little gods, had a lifespan that depended on the rotational impetus imparted by a snap of fingers or string. Encountering irregularities on the hardwood floor, they would wobble and sometimes fall; we cheered when they righted themselves and continued to roam, as they often did. Children instinctively understand the allegorical character of such games.

A top that does not lean in any direction — as happens only at maximum energy — is Plato’s image of the healthy soul and city. Such vital rectitude, which the Romans called religio, was traditionally formed by social ligaments of ancestral custom and habit that constrained the wild impulses of the young and made them straighten up, balancing their characters and aligning them with the ancestors below and the gods above. The ancients understood that moral alignment with traditional and transcendent norms optimises the energy of the human organism in a way that is essential for navigation. Lives tend to drift and fall apart without it.

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But punitive doctrinal correctness is no substitute for the basically healthy mores that have long kept the American polity from falling over. Our governing elites fail to understand that courage and moderation are the true and steady foundations of prudent policy. The good kind of political correctness that the Greeks called orthē doxa, upright opinion that furnishes sound premises for political deliberation, is rooted in these virtues and cannot be produced by the moral orthopedics of the propaganda state. The forceful imposition of woke political orthodoxy on the American public can only breed resentment and promote hypocrisy.

While energy is imparted externally to a spinning top, a republic is renewed from within, by the exertions of its citizens. But even well-founded ones eventually fall off kilter. Decline may begin gradually, with minute oscillations, or suddenly, through some external blow, but it always terminates in wild gyrations. Most often, decay results when internal forces move large numbers of citizens, and impede the motions of many others, in ways that throw the whole out of balance.

The chafing humiliations of the Covid police are just part of a surge of social friction that was gestating for years and exploded with the election of President Trump five years ago. Strong political passions, multiplied, amplified, and frequently concentrated on specific targets by corporate media and big tech, have destabilised our essential public and private institutions, virtually all of which, through some demonic Oedipal fatality, now seem intent on repudiating their founding principles and betraying their core missions.

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Some of those who, by reason of experience and accumulated wisdom, might still be capable of righting these institutions have been purged; the rest have mostly retired or retreated under fire, withdrawing much good and necessary energy from our common national life. Depleted and uncharacteristically depressed, the American people now spin and shudder along the edge of the abyss. What future awaits us if we forget how to live and work together in amity, and if, emptied of honest debate on matters of pressing concern, the public square echoes with blood curdling war cries?

I have become convinced that a particular deficit of historical memory lies at the root of all our ills. I think there will be no cure for what ails us unless we can recover the answer to one big question: What is America for? What are we about, as a nation? Lincoln taught at Gettysburg that the United States was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. The twin pillars of our American story are ordered liberty and individual dignity.

Ours is a unique experiment in mature self-governance, testing whether a nation of citizens who are free and equal under the law — and therefore free to make mistakes, to be wrong or right in their own ways and to stand or fall as they will under the hammer of experience — can long endure. This experiment involves considerable risk; as Tocqueville repeatedly reminds us, every one of our political institutions and practices balances goods against evils. But even when faced with the gravest political exigencies, our forefathers reckoned that the rewards of participation in the story of America were too precious to forgo.

This question of risk goes to the heart of the problem Crawford raised. Failure to comply with Covid regulations is presumed to be irrational because it exposes the populace to unnecessary dangers. But risk is always relative to possible outcomes, which today are seen darkly through a glass of psychological and physical safetyism. To take a real example, does the possibility that a student might suffer psychic injury from a book spine justify removing a volume entitled American Negro Poetry from a high school library? But what sort of injury are we talking about? And how does it compare to the possibility that a student will never hear Langston Hughes sing America or speak of rivers, or dream a world “where every man is free”? And above all, who has the right to decide these matters?

Our technocratic mandarins dislike such questions and recoil from the political uncertainties of democratic debate. Whatever its psychological causes, their longing for certainty in practice leads them to insist on it in theory, and so to end debate by any means necessary. This is an engine of comprehensive despotism because it can be satisfied only with the advent of univocal global answers.

The best outcome we could hope for if we continue down this road is what Tocqueville calls “the type of social well-being that can be provided by a very centralised administration to the people who submit to it”. “Travelers tell us,” he writes, “that the Chinese have tranquility without happiness, industry without progress, stability without strength, physical order without public morality.… I imagine that when China opens to Europeans, the latter will find there the most beautiful model of administrative centralization that exists in the universe.”

Prevent is a much-mocked government counter-terrorism strategy, which looks out for warning signs that someone is at risk of being radicalised into some form of violent extremism. About 6,000 people are referred to it each year. 

Every high-profile murder or act of terrorism appears to be followed by a story like this. The Manchester Arena suicide bomber was known to the security services. Lee Rigby’s killers were known to the security services. At least one of the London Bridge attackers was known to the security services. It’s not just in cases of terrorism: the murderer of Alice Gross had a criminal record for sexual assault. Sarah Everard’s killer had a history of indecent exposure.

There is a further sense of inevitability over the fact that, three days after Sir David’s murder, Priti Patel, the home secretary, declared that Prevent is “under review” to ensure that it is “fit for purpose”. This is, in fact, an ongoing review that was launched in 2019 and due to report in December, rather than a response to the atrocity. Yet the announcement was clearly intended to suggest that the murder represented a failure on the part of the surveillance and deradicalisation system.

But is it? The sense of inevitability is real: these stories crop up a lot. But the truth is they will continue to keep cropping up, almost every time there is a terror attack, and almost no matter what we do with Prevent or whatever its successor is. Prevent may be failing — though I’ll happily defer judgment until the publication of the review — but even if it were successful, when terrorist attacks happen, it is likely that the perpetrators would be on its books, or known to the security services.

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And more than that: as callous as it sounds, that may be for the best. To give a sense of why that is, it’s helpful to look at another system for spotting future risks: cancer screening.

You screen for prostate cancer with a blood test, which looks for levels of something called “prostate-specific antigen”, or PSA. If you’re between 50 and 69 years old, the “normal” level of PSA is given as below three nanograms per millilitre (ng/ml). If your test comes back higher than that, you are flagged as at risk of having prostate cancer.

But according to the NHS, about 15% of men who do have prostate cancer actually have “normal” levels of PSA: that is, below 3ng/ml. If you run a screening test like this, you’ll falsely reassure about one cancer sufferer in six that they are cancer-free.

There’s a straightforward solution to that, of course. Instead of putting your cut-off at 3ng/ml, you could make it 2.5ng/ml. Then you’d miss fewer cancers.

You can probably guess the outcome, though. If you move the cut-off lower, you’ll miss fewer real cancers, but you’ll scare more men unnecessarily. If you move the cut-off higher, you’ll get fewer false positives — you won’t tell as many men that they have cancer when they don’t — but you’ll get more false negatives: you’ll miss more real cancers.

You might think that it’s a pretty straightforward decision. Telling people that they have cancer when they don’t is inconvenient and alarming; telling people that they don’t have cancer when they do might kill them. So you err on the side of caution.

But that’s not how it works. False positives on cancer screenings can literally kill. People can end up having unnecessary surgeries, X-rays, chemo or radiotherapy. Complications are sufficiently common that the NHS says that the benefits of prostate cancer screening do not outweigh the risks.

The cost of getting it wrong is real with terrorism, too. The process is somewhat different, though. When it comes to the risk of someone being radicalised, unlike a blood test, there isn’t a number that you can read off. That doesn’t mean there can’t be one: it could be that the people who are passed on to Prevent are given a quasi-objective score. We do exactly that for, say, suicidality risk or autism or happiness, or any one of a thousand psychological functions. You tick boxes on a questionnaire about someone’s isolation, their anger, their ideologies, and if the score on the questionnaire adds up to more than 40 or whatever you declare them a terrorism risk. That is precisely what goes on, in a less obvious and open way, with things like AI parole decisions. 

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But as it happens, there isn’t an explicit number. The Prevent guidance says: “There is no fixed profile of a terrorist, so there is no defined threshold to determine whether an individual is at risk of being drawn into terrorism.” So there’s no nice straightforward “Terrorism risk: 13.6” readout.

Nonetheless, the same process is going on. A person comes into contact with the counterterrorism services. Of the 6,000 or so who are referred to Prevent each year, about 500 or so are deemed “vulnerable” to radicalisation and are passed on to a subgroup called “Channel”. 

Since referral to Channel is not based on an objective score, it’s based on a subjective feeling (or “expert judgment”): people will be flagged up if the panel judging them feels sufficiently strongly that they’re a risk. They might not explicitly say “Terrorism risk: 13.6”, but still, there is a threshold of risk, over which someone is considered a threat.

And just like the PSA levels in the blood, that assessment will be imperfect. If you read some young man saying something disturbing online, is it harmless anger and braggadocio, or are they a terrorist? You can raise your implicit threshold and avoid harassing innocent people, at the cost of an increased risk of missing a genuine terrorist, or you can lower it and correctly identify more terrorists, but at the cost of labelling a lot of harmless people as potential terrorists.

It might seem, like the cancer test in reverse, that there’s an asymmetry here: a false positive annoys people; a false negative kills people. But also like the cancer test, it’s not as simple as that. The false positives will be a lot more common than the false negatives — simply put, there are more mouthy non-terrorists than actual terrorists in the world. As I said before, there were 6,000 people referred to Prevent every year, and 500 or so were judged to be of sufficiently high risk to be passed on to Channel. But there have been only four actual terror attacks in the last two years. 

If you lower your threshold, raise the alarm on more borderline cases, then you will waste more police time, put more innocent people under needless scrutiny and stigmatise more communities. (It seems inevitable that a lowered threshold will mean more young Muslim men, in particular, being picked up by the security services.) That may be a price worth paying — but, let’s be clear, it will be a price that you pay. If you take in everybody suspicious for questioning — every misogynist loser on incel subreddits, every angry racist or radical Islamist on dark-web chatrooms — you may prevent one or two more attacks, but you will undoubtedly fill up your jails and enrage the populace.

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This doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. Moving your threshold is zero-sum. But you can change your test: if instead of testing for PSA you looked for some other marker, you might be able to tell whether someone had cancer with more accuracy. In the case of counter-terrorism, you could do things like increasing police funding for surveillance, rather than simply being more strict about your criteria — although of course that would mean less money elsewhere.

An alternative suggestion might be to abandon “expert judgment” and introduce something like I talked about above, an explicit algorithm: human judgment is famously terrible at predicting complex things like the likelihood of a criminal to reoffend, and algorithms consistently outperform us, as the psychologist Paul Meehl demonstrated way back in 1954. They beat humans at predicting the price of wine, how long a cancer patient will live, who will win a football match, how likely a business is to succeed and dozens of other subjects. It is likely that some fairly simple algorithm could do significantly better than the best experts at predicting who is a terror risk, as well.

But it could only ever be a partial improvement. Humans are stubbornly hard to predict. Part of the reason why algorithms can outperform human judgment in those fields is because human judgment is consistently terrible: we are very often wrong about who will reoffend, who will live and die, who will win a football match. It is not that algorithmic prediction is great; the future is still hard to know. However good we make our systems for detecting terrorists, they will never be very good. So terrible things will always happen, and when they do, we will assume our systems are too lax and need to be tightened.

It is tempting to think like that in the wake of an atrocity such as David Amess’s murder: to think that we ought to lower our thresholds of what counts as a risk. Perhaps it’s even true. But just as it is an unavoidable fact of reality that reducing false alarms means missing more real ones, a world in which Sir David’s murderer was caught ahead of time could be grimly authoritarian.

Most of the vulnerable have been vaccinated, and weekly deaths are still below the five-year average. Over the past week, an average of 10 people died from Covid-19 every day in the UK, a drop of 9% on the week before’s toll. Although each death is a human tragedy, we would not normally reorganise society on this scale to prevent 3,560 deaths per year.

Numbers of cases (by positive tests) and admissions to hospital are rising, but from a very low point. The ONS estimates that in England and Scotland just under 1 in 500 people had Covid in the week ending 5 June. Prevalence in Wales and Northern Ireland is much lower.

“We have seen an increase in cases as lockdown measures have loosened, but this has not been the same across all age groups,” says Professor Jennifer Rogers, a member of the Royal Statistical Society Covid-19 Task Force. “The week ending 6 June saw an overall increase in Covid-19 cases compared to the week before, but this was an increase of 124% in the 20-29 age group compared to an increase of 27% among those aged 60+.” She doesn’t think this rise in cases among the young should in itself be cause for concern:

“The younger age groups are more likely to be unvaccinated (or have received only one dose) and arguably they are also more likely to be heading to the pubs socialising with their friends. We probably shouldn’t be too surprised that we have seen an increase in cases, but we know that this younger age group also has the lowest risk if they do catch Covid-19, so an increase in cases shouldn’t necessarily mean a subsequent increase in hospitalisations and deaths.”

Unlike last autumn, when there wasn’t much we could do in the face of rising cases, other than staying away from each other, the continuing vaccination programme means we can now expect things to get better, not worse. Over half the adult population has double-dose protection, including over 95% of the over 70s, for whom Covid-19 bears the highest risk of causing death or acute illness.

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So why has the Government decided to defer freeing us from measures that are, at best, annoying and, at worst, devastating to whole sectors of the economy and society? There are two answers to this, a scientific one and a political one, though in practice it’s hard to separate them.

The scientific one is that, although the current figures for deaths and hospitalisations look better than the predictions upon which the roadmap was based, the near future is still very uncertain. All the models used to plan the roadmap are full of caveats about assumptions, as they should be. Among the things that they foresaw changing were new variants (which might be more transmissible and/or evade immunity), seasonal factors, and human behaviour.

All viruses mutate into new variants. That’s a fact of life. But it makes models of their future behaviour provisional. If the current variant spreads fast enough, and evades enough immune systems — either the previously infected or the vaccinated — models drawn up in February could look optimistic.

Then again, vaccine uptake and effectiveness (especially against death and severe illness) look better than the conservative assumptions made at the end of 2020. By March, Sage advisors were revising their predictions downwards. It was always expected that there would be a third wave of infections this summer, putting more people in hospital and sending some to their deaths. But still, we can’t know how bad the third wave will be.

Three separate institutions drew up new models for Sage in early June, all giving a range of predicted outcomes depending on variants, vaccines and policy options. At best, they foresee a rise in infections similar to January, but mainly among the young, with hospital beds occupied on a similar scale to November 2020, and deaths kept to a few hundred per day. At worst, they predict a repeat of January’s peak death rate. That outcome may not be the most likely, but the scientists modelling possible outcomes have put it into their reports.

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This is where the question becomes a political one. A decision taken now could lead to tens of thousands of deaths in the next few months — or inflict pointless damage to tens of thousands of lives in order to save a small number of them. The continuance of restrictions may not bother those happy working from home and socialising outdoors; but for many who work in hospitality, the arts and entertainment, it could be a fatal hammer blow to their working lives. Social distancing rules make many businesses unviable.

Too long a delay to the final Step 4 of unlocking could even result in more deaths in the medium term, as some infections are pushed into autumn and winter. As the LSHTM Interim Roadmap Assessment comments, “even the 2 or 5 week delay to Step 4 can result in modest increases in morbidity and mortality when measured until the end of the year as more cases are pushed back into the autumn”.

If you are in government, faced with massive uncertainty from your scientific advisors, and potentially massive impacts whichever course you decide, what are you supposed to do? You could take a principled decision to do what you reasonably think will have the best outcome, accepting that you can’t control the actual outcome — but will be held accountable in any case. Or you could consider what policy will minimise the chance of your being blamed for a very bad outcome. You could look at what the public thinks you should do.

Every time the Government announces new restrictive measures, or decides to extend existing restrictions, some of us object, on the grounds that the measures are disproportionate to the real dangers of Covid, or are more harmful to the fabric of society than alternative measures (supporting people to self-isolate, for example). Tens of thousands have taken to the streets to object.

But the truth is that the majority of Britons have supported the lockdown measures. Yes, that expressed support may go along with a certain amount of common-sense rule-bending, but in-principle objection is a minority position. A snap survey by YouGov, following the Liberation Day announcement, showed that 70% of the English population supported the extended restrictions. Older people were the most supportive, but it was a majority across all age groups.

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Given that public sentiment, what government would dare go ahead with a policy that might be seen to lead to another wave of Covid deaths?

The trouble is, we haven’t done nearly enough rational assessment of the harms and benefits of anti-Covid strategies. Invoking the idea of existential risk to push us all into complying with behavioural rules got the Government a free pass for policies that, in normal times, would have been unthinkable. Critics of specific measures were easily lumped in with conspiracy theorists who said the whole thing was a hoax, or “just the flu”. Suggesting that baton-charging sunbathers in parks was counter-productive provoked cries of “How many people do you want to die!?”

But there is also a danger that we’ll come to see the world only through the prism of risk, whether quantifiable or existential. If no level of risk is acceptable, why not surrender our everyday freedoms forever? When will we ever reach the point of it being safe to take off the masks and sit next to a stranger? When they first announced a lockdown in March 2020, the UK government turned on the tap of fear, but I don’t think they realised how hard it would be to turn off.

Until Covid came along, that falling appetite for taking risks was a soft cultural slide. Parents worried about letting their children play outside unsupervised (as they probably did at the same age) and then worried about their child’s mental health when their social lives moved online. Intimacy was something that the young, especially, liked to postpone, preferring more casual relationships, and mediation though technology. Why risk the awkwardness of telephone conversations, when you can text instead? Culture, from comedy to Young Adult literature, was trying to be less edgy and more inclusive, by avoiding material that might make somebody uncomfortable.

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Sage scientist: Don't rule out more delays

By Freddie Sayers

Covid is a real danger. It has killed millions worldwide, and it is far from over. It is reasonable to be afraid, and reasonable to take measures against it. But it’s not reasonable to expect a government to save every single person from it. It’s not reasonable to sacrifice every other social value to save every possible life.

Unfortunately, the Government’s authoritarian response to this deadly disease has been welcomed by a population that values protection above all. And having once offered itself as the strong, paternalistic shield against Covid, the Government will find it hard to back away.

Is there any hope for a citizenry so fearful, so averse to taking risks, so willing to give up liberty in return for safety?

There is one counter-example in recent history. A narrow majority of us willingly chose the riskier path in voting to take Britain into an unknown future, against expert advice and government warnings of financial loss and social chaos. Back in 2016, there was an appetite for taking a risk in the name of higher values — democracy, sovereignty, a sense of agency in an unpredictable world.

A country that voted for Brexit surely can’t be completely ready to give up all control over everyday life for ever.

This makes the goal of complete virus elimination — Zero Covid — look unrealistic, at least in the short term. But unfortunately for the Prime Minister, who is expected to announce Britain’s “roadmap” out of lockdown on Monday, it by no means answers the question of which route he should take.

When it took scientists less than a year from Covid’s outbreak to create a working vaccine, and not just one but several, relief was twofold. In one sense, the prospect of an end to both the disease’s merciless death toll and the atomised grimness of human life brought general euphoria to the darkness of November. But for politicians and others tasked with steering society between the Scylla of social destruction and the Charybdis of Covid itself, there was a different relief.

Without a workable vaccine, they faced the impossible task of extricating society from a cycle of lockdowns, knowing that doing so would probably mean a rise in deaths that could make the earlier stringent measures seem futile. With vaccines, though, normal life could return without sacrificing tens or hundreds of thousands more lives.

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Inside the Zero Covid campaign

By Freddie Sayers

But, as Number Ten is now discovering, the introduction of vaccines creates an entirely new set of dilemmas for governments across the developed world. For if it is possible, even in theory, to bring the infection rate so low that “test, trace, isolate” is a practical way to control the disease on its own, the current lockdown is probably the last chance to do that. Yet doing so would mean continuing the current stringent measures for months, long after the most vulnerable have been vaccinated; there are even rumours that the Government wants to maintain the current lockdown until cases (not hospitalisations) fall below one thousand a day — less than a tenth of the current figure.

But the first, and subsequent, lockdowns were justified as measures to keep deaths and serious cases at a level that wouldn’t overwhelm health services. If vaccinating the most vulnerable parts of the population breaks the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths — bringing the impact of Covid down to the level of a seasonal illness like flu — does it matter if infections remain as common as its cousin, the common cold, which infects the average adult two or three times per year?

This is the new dilemma facing policymakers and, though science can and must inform it, it is at heart a political question. Even government scientists are starting to express frustration about the UK government’s apparent unwillingness to grasp that nettle. As Professor Dame Angela McLean, Chief Scientific Advisor to the MoD and a member of SAGE, told a Science and Technology Select Committee on Wednesday: “It’s one of the things we have cried out for again and again. Could somebody in a position of political power tell us: what is an acceptable level of infections?”

She was answering a question about whether, as Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has suggested, we will have to live with Covid as we do with flu and other infectious diseases. And she agreed that “other infectious diseases that we put up with are probably a reasonable starting point”. But this in itself still doesn’t solve the political question, because, as Professor McLean pointed out, bad flu winters can still be remarkably deadly. It still comes down to a matter of judgement.

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The risk of eternal lockdown

By Adam Wagner

In recent UK history, the worst years for flu deaths were 1976 and 1999, when more than 60,000 people in England and Wales died from influenza or pneumonia. The best year in the last century was 1948, with under 20,000 deaths. That leaves a range of 20,000-60,000 deaths per year, up to half the Covid casualties so far, and up to 10% of the pre-Covid annual death toll.

After the last year, would that feel like an acceptable number of deaths? Conversely, would we accept another year of lockdowns to reduce the toll of Covid from 60,000 to 20,000? As Professor McLean said: “The question of what is acceptable is not a scientific question. That’s a question for the whole of society.”

It’s worth noting, however, one caveat provided by epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse, who is also a member of SAGE: “Whatever the answer is, it’s not zero.” That is, he explained, because if you take the view that every Covid death is unacceptable, “you are writing a blank cheque to do any amount of harm by the measures you’ve implemented to try and control it.”

Yet this, unfortunately, is the implicit view behind the Government’s policy, which makes it hard to rationally weigh the harms of lockdown measures against the reductions in risk from Covid. Indeed, Downing Street appears to still be following the alarming scenarios modelled by Warwick University, which show that any relaxation of social distancing measures before late 2021 will lead to another wave of deaths. But the authors of the Warwick models themselves acknowledge their assumption that vaccine efficacy applies equally to infection, mild and severe illness. However, they add, “if the vaccine has differential protection against the most severe disease this will impact our predictions for hospital admissions and deaths.”

And this is exactly what early data from Israel and elsewhere is indicating: vaccines may not prevent 100% of infections, but they do seem to prevent over 90% of hospitalisations and deaths. In effect, the Warwick assumptions about vaccine uptake, speed and effectiveness in preventing death, serious illness, and transmission are already being superseded by data. In Professor Woolhouse’s words: “Right now you should be looking at earlier unlocking, because the data is so good.”

This all sounds very positive. But while the R number is below one, it remains that the absolute case numbers are still comparable to those in spring last year. Official positive test results are over 10,000 per day, and the ONS estimates that over 700,000 people in the UK are currently infected, around 1% of the population.

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The Government's Covid comms failure

By Stuart Ritchie

The question now is: what is the end goal of the current social restrictions? Is it to keep hospitalisations within a level that the exhausted NHS can handle? Is it to keep deaths on a downward trend while restoring society to normality as fast as possible? Or is it to bring the rate of infection down to a level that could realistically be tracked, traced and isolated?

Only the Government can answer that question. It’s the responsibility of politicians, not scientists, to balance the risks of Covid against the social, economic and political impacts of the measures taken against it. Scientists themselves say so, again and again.

Risk is too often treated as a purely mathematical problem, but it has other dimensions too: psychological, social and political. There is no mathematical formula to tell any of us whether to take a chance on starting a business, proposing marriage, or riding a bicycle on city streets. We weigh up the possible outcomes and then commit to a course of action, in the knowledge that the future is uncertain and unknown. And in the same way, our leaders are forced to choose a course of action for the country as a whole.

Let us, by all means, be led by data. But data is a sextant, not a destination. What are we being led towards? What level of risk from Covid are we prepared to accept, and what are we prepared to sacrifice to reduce that risk? These questions are not statistical, but political.

Thanks to vaccines, the extra risks introduced to all our lives by Covid will soon be reduced to more familiar levels. Yet, having abandoned a rational approach to risk in favour of the view that “no Covid death is acceptable,” our politicians seem to be struggling to re-establish a grown up conversation about what we value as a society.

Zero-risk life is not an option. When Johnson finally reveals his “roadmap” to freedom, he would do well to start by explaining what kind of risk he is willing to take, and for what purpose.

Wearing their primitive breathing apparatus sets, Fourt-Wells and Stocking were sent down into the acrid smoke with an instruction to locate the seat of the fire. They were never seen alive again. Their bodies were eventually found among piles of frozen meat packets and animal carcasses.

The incident became the catalyst for a powerful campaign led by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) to modernise equipment and safety procedures. The union called for breathing apparatus sets to be equipped with low-pressure warning alarms and audible distress devices, and for a better system of monitoring firefighters while they were working in such hazardous conditions. The campaign was a success. Government and fire service bosses were eventually forced to concede that the demands were eminently reasonable. As ever, it had taken a tragedy to spark change.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

The FBU’s campaign was a commendable example of a trade union looking beyond the battleground of pay, and lobbying for the safety of its members at work. 60 years after the event, I hosted proceedings as a plaque dedicated to the memory of Fourt-Wells and Stocking was unveiled at the spot where they fell. We will never know the number of firefighters whose lives were saved — and, mercifully, whose names it was never necessary to inscribe on such plaques — thanks to the union’s efforts.

Other trade unions can justly lay claim to having been instrumental in bringing about a safer working environment for those they represent. The annual number of workplace deaths has been dramatically reduced from an average of over 4000 at the beginning of the last century to fewer than 200 today. This is why anyone who tries to persuade me, a lifelong trade unionist, that unions have no business interfering in such matters is liable to get short shrift. History shows that trade unions are overall a force for good when it comes to safety in the workplace, and we shouldn’t forget it.

All of which brings me to Covid-19. At all times and on all matters, trade unions must strive to ensure their demands are measured and pragmatic. Crucially, union leaders must always seek to take their members — and, where possible, the public too — with them. This is even more the case when the issue at hand is one that is politically contentious.

In that vein, it is surely vital, when assessing how best to keep a group of people safe during these times, to start from the point of acknowledging that the virus poses a meaningful threat to only a small minority of people — almost exclusively those who are either elderly or suffering from underlying medical conditions, or often both. For the vast majority who contract it, Covid-19 is not a serious virus, let alone a killer one. Most will experience either mild symptoms or none at all. In fact, as of 16 September 2020, the number of Covid-related deaths in England involving individuals under the age of 60 and free from existing medical conditions stood at just 308. And, for several of these, it is possible that Covid-19 was not the thing that actually killed them.

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Has Covid become less dangerous?

By Tom Chivers

So it is against this background, and out of genuine concern for the credibility and reputation of the trade union movement, that I express alarm over the manner in which the leadership of some unions have taken unreasoned and insupportable positions in their approach to the virus.

Look, for example, at what is happening in our universities. Last week, the leader of the University and College Union (UCU) — which represents lecturers, academics and support staff — reiterated the union’s call for a ban on face-to-face teaching until the Government had curbed the spread of the virus. That the level of risk to those on campus is infinitesimal wasn’t enough to stop the demand being made. And given that universities are already in turmoil — as a consequence of mass self-isolation, threats of disciplinary action against those caught breaching social distancing rules, and the prospect of Christmas on campus, the demand, though not without its supporters, has caused exasperation among some students and members of staff.

Several universities, presumably motivated in part by an earlier threat by the UCU of strike action, have already switched to online-only teaching, leaving some staff feeling adrift and angry. A lecturer from a university in the Midlands told me this week of the deep sense of frustration felt by him and his colleagues after their impending return to physical teaching was abruptly blocked on safety grounds. Of eight members of departmental staff, only one had expressed a desire to avoid face-to-face lessons.

For most who do it, teaching is more than just an ordinary job or source of income: it is a vocation. Many educators feel that if someone is going to prevent them from doing what they love, there had better be a compelling reason.

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There is no student mental health crisis

By Louise Perry

Professor Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist who has attracted prominence and acclaim for her criticisms of the lockdown approach, believes those demanding a ban on face-to-face teaching have called it seriously wrong. “The risks are not sufficient to justify us not doing our duty — which is to teach our students. To not teach them is a dereliction of duty,” she told me.

Of course it is right that trade unions pay close attention to emerging risks and seek to shape any institutional response. No one could reasonably argue against robust measures to protect the genuinely vulnerable in any scenario. But what possible merit is there in a strategy that strives to keep healthy lecturers and students apart out of fear of a virus from which, should they contract it at all, the overwhelming majority — if not all — will make a full recovery?

After the Summer brouhaha over the question of whether and when children should return to the classroom — an unnecessary and near-hysterical ruckus in which the teaching unions this time had a hand — a similar excess of caution has infected our schools. Such is daily life now for many children, they could be forgiven for assuming that a world of facemasks, social distancing and relentless hand-washing was the natural order of things. Never mind the risks of contracting Covid-19; we are in danger of creating a generation of OCD sufferers who think the environment around them will always be fraught with danger. Again, the sense of panic has not been commensurate with the level of risk.

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Can university survive Covid-19?

By Gerard De Groot

On one level, the over-reaction of the UCU and others might be seen as entirely rational. After all, the Government and media have done such an effective job scaring everyone witless, those demanding the most draconian and extreme measures might genuinely believe they are saving lots of lives.

The brutal truth, however, is that one thing has been missing throughout this entire debate: proportion. Safety in the workplace, as anywhere else, should be about implementing sensible and proportionate control measures to alleviate risk. It is this principle which underpins health and safety legislation. Instead, we have arrived at a point where, for many in positions of authority, any risk at all is too much and, where it exists, drastic action is required to eradicate it. That attitude serves no-one. Society becomes afflicted by paranoia, and individuals lose their ability to quantify risk — an essential skill in the armoury of any human being.

The easy thing for a trade unionist like me would be to go along with it all. After all, as long as most union members are still drawing a salary, why should it matter?

Well, it matters because the education of our young is being harmed, not to say our economy devastated, livelihoods destroyed and civil liberties curtailed. And when unions themselves are part of a crusade whose demands are utterly out of proportion to the risk, it behoves those of us who care about the movement to warn them to pull back, lest they alienate large numbers of rank-and-file trade unionists and incite wider public scorn over “bloody intransigent unions”. What a tragedy it would be if so much of the historical good done by unions in preventing death and injury in the workplace was overlooked as a consequence of the overzealous and irrational demands of a handful of leaders.

My recommendation is a slim book that fits in a pocket, and speaks of “anguish, abandonment and despair”. It’s not exactly holiday reading, but summer’s over, and many Brits will be feeling a combination of all three as the end of the furlough scheme looms and whispers of a second wave proliferate.

In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre’s subject is not the anguish of ordinary citizens, though, but the anguish of leadership: of taking on responsibility, in the knowledge that every choice you make will lead to suffering or death. At a time when our politicians have to decide between reducing the risk of more deaths from Covid-19, or reducing the society-wide destruction caused by anti-Covid policies, they need reminding that this anguish is inescapable. Hard choices must be made, and inaction is itself a choice.

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Will the Conservatives start conserving?

By Tom Holland

But there’s far more for our Government to learn from Sartre than simply how to grasp the nettle of leadership. If Twitter is anything to go by, lockdown left many of us grappling with the existential — wondering how to give meaning to our closed-off worlds — and Sartre was the man who first popularised the philosophy. “Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or cauliflower,” he writes. Contrasting existentialism to mechanistic philosophies of human behaviour, Sartre casts a harsh light on theories which “make man into an object”:

All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man including oneself as an object — that is, as a set of pre-determined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone.

Does this remind you of discussions about how best to nudge the population into following government guidelines to prevent infection? It should. Politicians took advice from behavioural psychologists — as Sartre notes, to seek advice, and from whom, is itself a choice — and decided to use fear as a motivating force. The psychologists even warned that fear for personal safety might, in the long run, backfire. Having galloped into lockdown with an air of “we have no choice, people will die!” the Cabinet must now choose the path out, knowing that there is no easy option, and accepting responsibility for their decisions. Could this little book help?

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The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Existentialism is often criticised as individualistic and abstract; Sartre wrote Existentialism and Humanism as a corrective to these claims. Yes, each person is condemned to be free, to make their own choices and find their own meaning, but we must also recognise that humanity in everyone else. Writing in 1945, with the war against Nazism still ringing in his ears, Sartre spells out that recognising the existential freedom of each individual human must also mean defending the freedom of all humans. “We will freedom for freedom’s sake, and in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends on our own.”

Before you rip off your mask and put your foot down in a 20mph zone, read on. This principled stand, inconveniently, does not imply any specific course of action. The actions you choose in the real world are still your own responsibility. You might decide that wearing a little piece of cloth is preferable to rising infection and consequent lockdown, or that mask-wearing contributes to a culture of fear which constrains us all psychologically.

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It's worth taking a risk over Covid-19

By Timandra Harkness

How do you weigh the value of every human life that might be cut short by Covid (or by another cause while Covid dominates health provision and government attention) against the value, to each and all of us, of living life as fully as possible? “Life is nothing until it is lived;” says Sartre, “but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose.”

Staying alive is not enough. We also need sense, purpose and value in our shared human life. Our leaders must protect not just our lives, but our freedom to live. That is the anguish of leadership. It is the anguish of being human, and therefore free.

They’re unsettling, disgusting things, threadworms: or they were to me, when I first came across them. But – luckily – they’re easily treated. A cheap, over-the-counter medicine, mebendazole, kills the lot. You have to dose the whole family, clean your linen, and dose again two weeks later, because the eggs (god, I’m shuddering just typing this) survive for a couple of weeks; but basically there is a simple, nuke-them-all-from-orbit cure.

Threadworms are just one species of intestinal worms, also known as helminths; there are hookworms, pinworms, tapeworms, whipworms, others. And they’re common — not just in north London, but around the world. The US Centres for Disease Control estimate that Ascaris lumbricoides is present in the intestinal tracts of about 1 billion people around the world. Usually, the infection has no symptoms, but in children it can lead to malnutrition, slow growth and impaired learning.

Luckily, again, these helminths can be killed with the same drug, mebendazole, or a related one, albendazole. Just as with the threadworms that cause itchy bottoms in the rich west, the Ascaris that cause childhood stunting in the developing world can be nuked, effectively and cheaply. A course of albendazole costs a few cents.

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Coronavirus is the wake-up call we need

By Tom Chivers

Dosing someone who’s been diagnosed with helminths, then, is a no-brainer. It’s cheap and easy and effective. But over the past 20 years or so, there’s been a row going on about doing more than that: about giving the drugs to entire schools’ worth of children, regardless of whether they’ve been diagnosed with worms or not. 

In the late 1990s, two economists, Edward Miguel of Berkeley and Michael Kremer of Harvard, ran a study. They took 75 schools in Kenya, and gave albendazole to all the kids in 50 of them. Their results were impressive: absenteeism dropped by a quarter; children did better at school. The benefits also seemed to spread to nearby schools which hadn’t been treated, presumably by disrupting the spread of worms in the region. The whole thing cost $3.50 per pupil.

Where it got really interesting, though, was a follow-up study, a decade later. It found that the children in the schools not only did better at school — when they left school, the benefits continued. They earned more — about 15% more, on average — than those who had not been dosed. That is a huge benefit for a tiny cost. So everyone — including the WHO — got on board with deworming programmes. (Apparently, Cherie Blair even dressed up as a giant worm at Davos and chased people around.)

Then it all went a bit crazy. Two epidemiologists at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reanalysed Michael and Kremer’s data, and found errors in the code, and some missing information, which led them to severely downgrade the findings: notably, the effect on surrounding schools disappeared. (It’s worth noting that there’s no suggestion of malpractice, and the LSHTM team and others have been full of praise with M&K for sharing their code and data so fully.) They also noted that the study wasn’t properly randomised or blinded. Then the well-respected Cochrane Collaboration released a report saying that there was little evidence that deworming programmes show benefit. Now a new study, again by M&K, claims that the economic benefits are still continuing.

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Are humans heading for the knacker’s yard?

By Peter Franklin

If you want to read about the whole saga, which came to be known as the Worm Wars, I recommend Tim Harford’s thoughtful take on it, and Ben Goldacre’s more sceptical one. There is a lot of back-and-forth, with defenders of M&K saying that the statistical techniques used by the LSHTM team made it almost impossible for the programmes to find a benefit. “To be quite frank, you have to throw so much crazy shit at Miguel-Kremer to make the result go away that I believe the result even more than when I started,” said one professor of public policy. On the other hand, one researcher into evidence-based charity told me “no one believes this but the economists”.

This all came up when I was writing my last book — which, somewhat incongruously, was about artificial intelligence, and whether it would destroy the human race. The two topics don’t necessarily seem connected, but they are.

The effective altruism community is a loosely affiliated group of people and organisations who try to find the best way of donating and spending charitable money, so it will do the most good in the world. For instance, imagine you want to help people who have visual impairment. You’re deciding whether to donate to a guide dog charity, or to a charity which provides surgery for trachoma in the developing world. As the effective altruism charity Giving What We Can points out, it costs about $50,000 to breed and train a guide dog, but you can restore many trachoma sufferer’s vision with an operation costing about $1,000. “For the same amount of money as training one guide dog to help one person,” they say, “we could instead cure about 50 cases of severe vision impairment.” That seems a fairly straightforward decision.

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The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By jon cruddas

Sometimes it’s not so clear. Is extending someone’s life by a year worth more or less than providing secondary education for a child? Is funding research into a Covid vaccine more or less effective than supporting democratic movements in authoritarian countries? But often, since most of us give to charity in fairly un-thought-through ways, it’s easy to improve the good we do. The simplest method is what William MacAskill, a professor of ethics at Oxford and founding member of the effective altruism movement, calls the “100x multiplier”: if you donate to a charity that works in the developing world, you can roughly expect to do 100 times as much good as if you donate to one that does a similar thing in the rich West. 

Effective altruist organisations such as GiveWell and Giving What We Can give lists of the most efficient charities to give to: the standout ones are about malaria. GiveWell estimates that roughly every $2,300 spent on bednets coated in insecticide will save one child’s life.

What I find interesting, though, is that both organisations recommend the Deworm the World Initiative and other deworming programmes. The effective altruism movement isn’t unaware of the Worm Wars controversy: GiveWell discusses it all in two lengthy, stats-heavy blog posts. They mention various reasons why the Cochrane review might have missed something — notably, it only looked at weight gain and school performance, not future earnings. But they also note that the children Miguel & Kremer’s research looked at had abnormally high levels of infestation, and that there are no obvious short-term mechanisms which could explain the long-term benefits — which should make us less confident that there’s anything real going on.

But they still recommend it — because, in short, they think the gamble is worth it.

There’s a concept in probability theory called “expected value”. That is, how much, on average, you can expect some action to return. Say someone offers to flip a coin with you: on heads they pay you £2, on tails you pay them £1. Your expected value is (2-1)/2, or 50p: if you played the game lots of times, you’d expect to make an average of 50p per throw.

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Can poorer nations survive Covid-19?

By Daniel knowles

With deworming, effective altruists are doing exactly the same thing. There’s a strong possibility that deworming has no effect whatsoever on future earnings, or at least a hugely reduced one. But there is a small possibility that it has a huge, overwhelming impact, at a very low cost. The expected value of deworming — the impact multiplied by the probability, minus the cost — is huge, even taking into account the possibility that it doesn’t work at all. GiveWell assumes that its impact is 100 times less than the Miguel-Kremer study claims, and, even at that level, finds that it is cost-effective.

This is all very straightforward and I think most people would get on board with it. But the same reasoning leads you to stranger places, which is where AI comes in.

Nick Bostrom, the philosopher and AI researcher, points out in his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies that there are a lot of humans who are yet to live. I discussed exactly how he works it out in an earlier post, so I won’t go over it again, but he ends up with 10^58 humans (one followed by 58 zeroes; a big number) before we run out of universe. That would be a very great positive — assuming that we think that human life is a positive thing, and that we would, all else being equal, prefer more happy lives than fewer.

So ensuring that humans don’t go extinct (a rogue AI or a bioengineered pandemic are considered the most likely ways that will happen) has a huge potential upside: quintillions and septillions of lives, unthinkably huge numbers. So even if there’s only a one-in-a-billion chance that he’s right, or one in 10 billion, it doesn’t matter. Those numbers are so huge that the expected value of anything that might improve the chance even by a fraction of a percent make the expected value — the benefit times the probability — spectacularly large. 

So, for large parts of the effective altruism community, the most effective way to do good in the world is to donate to organisations that will reduce the chance of an AI apocalypse, and to ensure that any superintelligent AIs we do build will work to help humanity survive, in a form that we would want.

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Are economists really this stupid?

By Tom Chivers

This sort of reasoning can take you to some very strange places, but it’d be too easy to wash your hands of it and say it’s all crazy. It’s not; if anything I rather admire the tendency to follow the reasoning where it leads, and not simply pull up short and say “OK now we’re getting weird.” My own instincts are that concern about existential risk is pretty sensible and that AI is a reasonably likely way that we could blow ourselves up. And most effective altruism is of the much more worldly, small-scale “antimalarial bed nets” calibre.

This latest Miguel/Kremer study, for what it’s worth, doesn’t seem to have shifted opinions much in the Worm Wars. The evidence-based charity researcher I spoke to points out that it is essentially a continuation of the previous studies, so all the problems that existed in the first studies are still there now. More than that, it follows the same group of people as the previous ones — it would be frankly weird if they had all suddenly become poor, after years of being richer.  “Same shit, different year,” the researcher said, succinctly. More importantly, this person says, there is a chance — which as far as I know has not been studied — that mass dosing with deworming drugs could cause worms to evolve a resistance to those drugs, like antibiotics create antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It is not inconceivable that the actual impact is negative, which would affect the calculations somewhat. 

Miguel Kremer, meanwhile, has won a Nobel prize in economics. “So we know who won the Worm Wars,” my source says. “I’m sure that will end all the arguments;” that last said with heavy sarcasm.

I’ve broken the omertà; if you don’t hear from me again, I’ve been silenced by the parent mafia. Only parents and developmental economists are allowed to talk about de-worming. But now you know how itchy bottoms relate to the AI apocalypse.

Let’s imagine that you want to know whether water causes cancer. You do a simple study: you go to your local hospital, look at all the people who’ve got cancer, and check whether they had recently drunk some water. You find that almost all of them had, so you conclude that water is a carcinogen.

Very obviously, this is not a good way of doing the study. Since almost everyone drinks water, you’d find that almost everyone who had cancer had drunk water, even if drinking water in no way increased your chances of getting cancer. What you need to do, instead, is compare people who did get cancer with people who didn’t, and see whether one group is more likely to have drunk water lately.

(As it happens, the scientific consensus at the moment leans towards the idea that drinking water is a good idea.)

This is an example of a mistake called “selecting on the dependent variable”. In science, the dependent variable is the thing you’re trying to measure; the independent variable is the thing you change. So in a drug trial, the independent variable might be the dose of the drug; the dependent variable might be whether or not the patient survives. If you only looked at the patients who survived, the results of your drug trial would not be very useful.

In a subtle way, though, this is what the media does all the time. Like the water-causing-death study, it selects on the dependent variable: and for the media, the dependent variable is whether it’s interesting.

For instance: you read about murders, and plane crashes, and mass shootings. Your daily intake of information about things that happen in the world is selected by the things that have actually happened. You won’t read about the people who walk through your local park and aren’t stabbed, or the planes that landed safely. So your sense of what is risky in the world is skewed, because all of the things that you read about have been selected on the dependent variable – everything you read has been chosen, not because it gives you a real sense of how likely it is to happen, but because it is interesting to read about.

More from this author

Covid could become the new common cold

By Tom Chivers

It’s incredibly pervasive. You want to know whether, say, cancel culture is real. So you look out for examples: you read about, say, David Shor, the data analyst at a consulting firm who was fired after he tweeted some research by a black academic suggesting that violent protests are less politically effective than non-violent ones, which activists on Twitter told him “reeked of anti-blackness”.

Or Emmanuel Cafferty, the part-Latino electrical worker who was fired for making an “OK” symbol out of the window to a driver who filmed him and claimed it was a neo-Nazi sign. Or Majdi Wadi, whose catering business collapsed — almost all his contracts cancelled — after it was discovered that his daughter had, 10 years earlier at the age of 14, tweeted a lot of anti-semitic bile. You can very quickly get a lot of examples of extremely bad things happening.

You can equally quickly get a long list of black people who’ve been killed by the police in the US, or black children who’ve been arrested at gunpoint in the UK. You can do the same with trans women being murdered, or – to go on the other side of that particular argument – with sexual predators claiming to be trans to get into women’s refuges.

To be clear: these are dreadful things that shouldn’t happen at all. But in a world with billions of people, dreadful things that shouldn’t happen at all will happen quite often. The question of interest is how likely are they to happen to a given person. And even if the media is full of examples all day, every day, for years, that tells you nothing about how common it actually is, because the incidents have been selected on the dependent variable: how interesting they are.

More from this author

Is there really a Covid mental health crisis?

By Tom Chivers

Selecting on the dependent variable is just one way that — usually innocently — the media distorts our understanding of risk and numbers. In How to Read Numbers, an upcoming book I’m writing with my cousin David, an economist at the University of Durham, we try to look at a few of those ways.

For instance, numbers are often given without context: if 163 people have died in police custody over the last 10 years, is that a lot or a little? Well, you don’t know, unless you know how many people were in police custody in that time: if it was 1,000, that’s a very different story to if it was 10 million. In mathematical terms, it’s not enough to know the numerator, the number on top of the line in a fraction — you need to know the denominator, as well. 

Or if a story says that children born to men in their 50s are 18% more likely to suffer from seizures, that sounds pretty bad. But presenting risks in this relative form can make small changes sound worse than they are — if, in reality, your risk goes up from 0.024% to 0.028%, as is in fact the case, then you may not care all that much. Without this sense of the absolute risk, rather than the relative increase, people can’t easily use it to make decisions.

Other times, it’s easy to misrepresent numbers by cherry-picking them, or to suggest a causal link where there isn’t one.

And by doing that, the media can make it look, probably falsely, like we’re suffering an epidemic of teen suicide, or an epidemic of loneliness; or that the red-tops caused Brexit, or that a Boris Johnson column caused a 375% jump in hate crimes.

Suggested reading

We don't deserve our wretched media class

By Graeme Archer

This is all especially relevant now, as the Covid-19 epidemic has forced everyone to undertake a rapid and high-stakes crash course in statistics. Suddenly everyone, including journalists, has to be conversant in things like Bayes’ theorem, statistical modelling and Goodhart’s Law.

But misunderstanding them in even subtle ways can cause quite serious misrepresentations of the data: for instance, at one stage it led people to think that the virus was spreading faster when it was in fact on the decline. Conversely, if journalists had been more comfortable with ideas like exponential spread, there might have been fewer downplaying the risks early on, or laughing off suggestions that it was more dangerous than the flu.

None of this, we want to stress, is deliberate, or even especially blameworthy; journalists make mistakes, and like the rest of us, most are not especially numerate. But it is important, because we need good information to navigate the world.

We wanted to look at some of these ways that numbers can go wrong, and give some simple tips on working out which numbers you can trust. Vitally, we also wanted to suggest a few guidelines for the media — a sort of style guide for presenting numbers. Simple steps like giving absolute risk as well as relative, and trying to present numbers in context, or to be careful about saying that A causes B. Similarly, letting readers know some basic facts, like giving the sample size if you’re quoting a scientific study, and being aware of the issues in science such as publication bias, can help avoid misleading people.

Most of the time, we think, the mistakes are innocent — journalists aren’t statisticians or scientists, and will make the same mistakes the rest of us do. But when members of the media make them, it makes the rest of us understand the world less well. It would be amazingly easy, if you’re not careful, to end up writing a story about how water causes cancer.

“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

Applied across our lives, such schemes may deliver a narrowly defined goal of increasing social utility. At the same time they deplete our lives of meaning, and thereby of value for us. Driving is not just a means to the end of getting from one place to another. For many people it is, or can be, an important part of the good life. “To drive is to exercise one’s skill at being free,” Crawford writes at the close of Why We Drive, “and one can’t help but feel this when one gets behind the wheel. It seems a skill worth preserving.”

Interview

The case for taking more risks

By UnHerd

A research fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and a motorcycle mechanic, Crawford first presented his philosophy of human action in The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing things Feels Good (2010; published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft, 2009). He developed his account most systematically in The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction (2016), where he mounted an attack on what he described, provocatively but to my mind accurately, as “autistic freedom”.

In this view, which Crawford finds prefigured in Immanuel Kant’s understanding of rational autonomy, human beings are free to the extent that they are not exposed to contingency and accident. But such an idea of freedom requires an imaginary separation from our bodies, which are inherently accident-prone, and from the instinctive responses for dealing with their fragility that are built into them. Environments designed to eliminate danger from our lives impair abilities that are essential to our humanity. The need for security and risk-control is real enough, and at times overriding. But displacing human skill and agency does not always enhance safety, and when applied across society it has the dystopian effects to be expected from a technocratic ideology.

More from this author

Why the Greens should stop playing God

By John Gray

Applying this critique, Crawford is sceptical about schemes to prevent reckless driving. In one of many fascinating asides, he notes that though there are no speed limits on much of the Autobahn network in Germany, the country has one of the lowest rates of traffic fatalities in the world. The fact has an interesting backstory. In the 1930s, when the autobahns were being built, the Nazis abolished speed limits. Instead a “traffic community” would practice “chivalry” and “obedience”, and restrictions would no longer be needed. But after the adoption of the Reich Highway Code in 1934, German traffic fatalities spiralled to become the worst in Europe. By 1939 speed limits were back in place.

The lesson of the experiment, Crawford writes, is that “a traffic community cannot be created by fiat. It has to grow organically over time, as it depends on social norms that have worked their way into people’s dispositions.” This is partly a matter of individual traits such as restraint and self-control, but also involves recognising similar traits in other drivers. Low rates of fatal accidents in systems without speed limits require a community in which drivers understand and trust one another. To be sure, not the supposedly innate racial or national community the Nazis imagined. Germans had to learn how to drive fast safely, and did so in the civic order that was reconstructed during the post-war peace.

Lying behind schemes that seek to eliminate risky driving, Crawford suggests, is a dream of harmony. In support of this view, he quotes a passage from Michael Oakeshott:

They tell us that they have seen in a dream the glorious, collisionless manner of living proper to all mankind, and this dream they understand as their warrant for seeking to remove the diversities and occasions of conflict which distinguish our current manner of living…And such people understand the office of government to be to turn a private dream into a public and compulsory manner of living.

Oakeshott (1901-1990) has recently enjoyed a late celebrity as a critic of doctrinaire libertarianism. Few of those who have cited him for this reason can have read a single page of his writings.

Suggested reading

Let Top Gear be toxic

By Tanya Gold

In his seminal Rationalism in Politics and other essays (1962), he explained that by rationalism he meant the belief that a combination of scientific theorising with technical expertise can replace, and improve upon, the tacit understandings of how to live that are embodied in our habits and skills. In ethics and politics, theories and ideologies are always abbreviations of practices we learn by imitation. John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, for example, did not uncover “principles” of which the world had until then been ignorant. Locke was summarising an already emerging way of life. Books like his are distillation from practical experience, not revelations of any truths on which practice is supposedly based.

Oakeshott attacked political ideologies of all kinds, including that of his LSE colleague F.A. Hayek, whose “plan to resist all planning” he thought belonged to the same style of doctrinaire politics. But if those who cite Oakeshott as the quintessential sceptical conservative had bothered to read the Contents page of Rationalism in Politics, they would have discovered an essay entitled “The Political Economy of Freedom”, where he defends a libertarian economic programme far more radical than any contemplated by Brexiteers. (In conversations with me in the Eighties, Oakeshott expressed admiration for Enoch Powell, who he thought articulated an English tradition of limited government.) Oakeshott may have disdained doctrinaire politics, but he was himself a doctrinaire libertarian.

The point is not that Oakeshott was inconsistent, though plainly he was. Rather, a politics of practical knowledge does not fit well into familiar debates about libertarianism and state control. Crawford’s target is a certain kind of modernism, found as much on the liberal Left as on the libertarian Right, which denigrates as irrational, atavistic and doomed ways of life to which many people remain deeply attached. He captures the jargon of this modernist cult beautifully:

‘Rust Belt’ means a place that has failed to adapt to the inevitable, and therefore fell to decay and ultimate extinction. Wrong-side of history-ism is a progressive version of social Darwinism; both invoke inexorable natural processes to cast political losers in a certain light. A sense of inevitability is constantly cultivated in the announcements of the tech firms, and this seems to be a deliberate strategy to demoralize political opposition wherever it appears in response to some new incursion.

Crawford is unequivocal in his rejection of liberal modernism, but he never falls into the trap of identifying his view of practical knowledge with conservatism or libertarianism. This sensitivity to the political dimensions of his subject distinguishes Why We Drive from Robert Pirsig’s bestselling Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), a semi-fictional first-person narrative with long passages exploring differences between “classical” and “romantic” styles of thinking as they apply to the author’s life. Though he writes from his own experience, Crawford is more interested in the public import of what he has learnt from driving than in how it contributed to his own self-development.

Suggested reading

Who'll have the guts to ban cars from our cities?

By Peter Franklin

One of the most original and mind-opening studies of practical philosophy to have appeared for many years, Why We Drive spells out in vivid detail what is wrong with the prevailing idea of the human subject. Seemingly diverging from Kant’s idea of rational autonomy, a utilitarian account of human action has developed in which reason means the calculation of outcomes. In fact this is another version of the disembodied humanity Kant imagined. Most fully elaborated in economics but pervasive throughout much of today’s political discourse, it is a view in which human beings are preference-satisfying machines. These homunculi attach no intrinsic significance to how they live. The quality of their experience is relevant only insofar as it enables them to gratify their desires as efficiently as possible. It is as if their lives were simply means whereby they get from one satisfaction to another.

Rather than rehearsing philosophical arguments against this position, Crawford reveals its limitations through examples. He begins by describing riding a dirt bike off-road on a narrow, rocky, meandering trail in a wooded area in Richmond, Virginia. It is a dangerous business that demands total concentration, and as he admits, “in no way typical of the driving that we do most of the time”. Driving like this requires “a leap of faith” in one’s natural and learned abilities, but the result can be an enhanced trust in the body when it is super-attuned to the world of which it is a part. Whereas collisionless freedom is a sickly dream, steering your way through hazardous territory at high speed can be “a state of grace”.

The book proceeds by examining various automotive subcultures — a demolition derby in the American South, a desert race on southern Nevada, a scramble in Virginia, an “adult soap box derby” in Portland, Oregon. Crawford also describes how he acquired a 1975 Beetle, which over the next eight years he drove, disassembled and reassembled until all that now remains of the original is “the upper portion of the central spine, the rear torsion housing and the upper portion of the body shell”. He accepts that many — including his wife — find it hard to grasp the point of “being loyal to a heap of rusted metal”.

More from this author

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

These rather exotic milieus and pursuits are some distance from the routines of the automotive commuter who buys and drives a car because they have no alternative. But they illustrate the need for agency that can be expressed in driving, and point to its larger reverberations. Mass protests by London taxi-drivers, Crawford writes,

… expressed and contributed to the Brexit mood. This was a fight for economic sovereignty by highly trained professionals against the threat posed by foreign ride-hailing firms that rely on map software, US military satellites, and the subsistence drivers of the gig economy… These movements are partly a response, at once spirited and rational, to a creeping colonization of the space for skilled human activity.

When we recall that Crawford thinks of human freedom as a skill, we can grasp the full meaning of this observation. Green thinkers and many others tend to represent driving as a burden imposed on us by a dearth of mass public transit, and they are not wrong. But as well as being a kind of oppression, driving is also — for some people, some of the time — an assertion of their humanity.

In most cases ministers have no choice but to do what it takes. If they let, say, Transport for London go down the tubes, there’ll be no return to normality.

But there’s one industry where the question isn’t “how do we save it?”, but “can we save it?” and even “should we save it?”

That industry is the great enabler of the global economy: aviation.

Can we imagine a world without mass air travel? Well, you don’t have to — just look out the window. Or at one of those flight tracker websites. Even around cities like London the skies are almost clear, the airports all but deserted, airlines operating at a tiny fraction of their capacity.

But that’s temporary, right? Aviation might be one of the last industries to recover, but it’s not like the aeroplanes have all crashed. The supporting infrastructure is intact. The industry has everything it needs to get off the ground again — everything but enough money, and that’s something the state can provide.

After all, there’s more than the economy at stake here. Safe and affordable air travel is one of the great signifiers of modernity. More than any other, this is the technological advance that delineates our era from the plodding, earthbound, black-and-white world that preceded it. To turn our backs on all of that, to regress to a less advanced stage in our development, well, that’s a textbook definition of civilisational decline.

Suggested reading

Covid is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

By Peter Franklin

When Radio 4’s In Our Time tackled the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th Century, Melvyn Bragg asked his guests whether the concept of ‘decline’ was still considered valid by contemporary scholars. After some academic umming-and-ahhing, it was Professor Charlotte Roueché who got to the point: hot-and-cold running water. The Romans had it throughout their empire, and then it was lost. For centuries. That’s your decline, right there.

Can we imagine something similar happening in our own day and age — the permanent loss of a ubiquitous technology? Needless to say, we discard technologies all the time — when they’re superseded by something better (or, at least, more convenient). Take recorded music, where we went from wax cylinders to shellac records to vinyl records to CDs to streaming (plus various other steps and detours in between). But occasionally we abandon a technology for which there’s no replacement. Something we used to be able to do just stops.

Suggested reading

Will we ever take the Tube again?

By Michael Liebreich

Older readers may remember the shoe-fitting fluoroscope (or, to use a rather unfortunate proprietary name, the Pedoscope). It’s purpose was to take the guess work out of shoe shopping. This is always a pain — and sometimes a permanent one if the shoes that felt fine in the shop turn out to be too tight or too loose.

But what if you could literally see through the shoe leather to see how good the fit is?  What if there were some sort of X-ray device that displayed an image of the shoe around the bones of your foot? Indeed, what if you could wiggle your phalanges and view them moving around inside their new confines? Sales assistants could be trained to make an objective assessment — allowing you to purchase with confidence.

It sounds futuristic, but this technology belongs to the past. Fluoroscopes were once a common sight in our shoe shops. Thousands of the devices were installed in the mid-20th century. Until, that is, people realised that the high street isn’t the best place for a boxful of radioactive isotopes (an X-ray machine needs an X-ray source). It was decided that pinched toes were preferable to radiation burns, and so that was the end of that.

There’s another, much grander, example from the mid-20th century: manned spaceflight beyond Earth orbit. It’s now 47 years since we last visited another world. And I don’t see plans for a return to the moon being a spending priority in the post-Covid era.

So, yes, even in the modern age, we sometimes take a technological step backwards because we can’t sustain the cost of progress.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Peter Franklin

Could the same apply to mass air travel? Aviation has had to take a step back before. Between the wars, there was a serious attempt to deliver commercial trans-Atlantic flights by airship. Tragically, it all came to grief with the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.

Yet that was only a temporary reverse. After the Second World War, aeroplane technology would grow into the industry we know today. The world’s airlines now carry over four billion passengers every year (‘now’ meaning the last few years until 2020 happened).

That’s about eight trillion passenger-kilometers. Numbers have basically doubled over the last two decades, and are predicted to more than double again over the next twenty years. Certainly there’s plenty of potential for growth because only a fifth of the world’s population has ever flown. They seem keen to try, however. In Asia alone, it’s estimated that 100 million people fly for the first time time every year.

If you look at the modern technologies that have been set aside without replacement they are either trivial (like the Pedoscope) or experimental (like manned spaceflight). Mass air travel is clearly unlike either of those, which is why its loss seems so unimaginable.

And yet whether a technology is abandoned or not isn’t determined by the extent of its benefit, but by whether the benefits are outweighed by the costs.

Airlines have innovated to increase the affordability, if not the pleasantness, of air travel. They’ve pushed the limits of euclidean geometry (and human anatomy) to fit ever more seats into the same space. We may complain, but the industry knows we’re suckers for a cheap ride.

Covid-19 throws all of that into doubt. 

There’s no social distancing on a packed plane — not even if middle seats are left empty. With a typical seat pitch (the distance between the same point on each row) of about 75cm, keeping a two metre separation is impossible — and that’s without the sociopath in front of you reclining into your face.

The industry claims that there are other ways of keeping passengers safe. For instance, the filtration systems which continually clean the cabin air. Then again, just look at this simulation of how airborne droplets from a single sneeze spread around a plane. Grim.

No matter what adjustments are made on board, the fact is that to fly means spending several hours in a tin can with hundreds of strangers — and you don’t where they’ve been.

To persuade us of the safety of that, airlines will mainly be relying on what happens on the ground. From temperature scans to spit tests, screening procedures are a first line of defence in airports around the world. The already tiresome business of getting through an airport will get several times worse. For instance, read Laurel Chor’s account of what it takes to fly from London to Hong Kong. We’re talking about hours of extra delay — and not in a comfy airport lounge, but in some spartan, socially-distanced warehouse. And, of course, there’s always the risk that you’ll fail a check and be refused entry.

With that rigmarole in place, most trips — whether for business or pleasure — become untenable.

These controls are likely to last a lot longer than other aspects of the lockdown. In respect to international air travel, any relaxation depends on progress being made not just in the country in question, but globally.

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Test article

By Freddie Sayers

It seems likely that hopes of widespread asymptomatic infection — and thus of achieving herd immunity — have been dashed. Most countries’ strategy for getting out of lockdown will be about suppressing transmission of the disease at home. As they get closer to that goal, efforts to prevent re-infection from abroad are likely to tighten not loosen.

The British government is now introducing a quarantine period for air passengers arriving in the UK. This would require them to self-isolate at a private residence for 14 days. Obviously, that rules out most business and holiday travel. The airlines aren’t happy — and they won’t have been consoled by some recent remarks by the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock: “It’s unlikely that big, lavish international holidays are going to be possible this summer.”

Indeed, governments are unlikely to let down their guard or consumers to regain their confidence until we’ve gone through the coming winter without a serious second wave of the disease. So, the big question for the airlines is what happens next summer.

Even if lockdown is lifted and borders re-open, how many of us will have the confidence — or the money — to fly abroad on holiday again? As for business travel, will we see an explosion of pent-up demand (from, say, personnel deployed to rebuild global supply chains) or an accelerated process of deglobalisation? We don’t know yet, because none of this has happened before.

We can be certain that demand will recover, but there’s no telling how rapidly or to what extent. With airlines already fragilised by debt and months of massively reduced revenues, there is a significant chance of an industry-wide meltdown.

In which case, what should governments do about it? Presumably, they won’t allow national flag carriers to collapse, but would it be sensible to bail-out or nationalise every airline? Not in the context of dramatically reduced demand. If there is a need for a general bail-out, then it can’t happen without a restructuring of the whole industry. And by ‘restructuring’, I mean downsizing.

Whatever happens, we need to ask what purpose aviation actually serves. This is a moment in history when we’re rethinking the case for globalisation, wrestling with the challenge of climate change, and reeling from the impact of pandemic disease. The question of whether mass air travel does more harm than good is now open and urgent.

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How travel narrows the mind

By Giles Fraser

A world where we radically restrict air travel is no longer unthinkable. The downside of hyper-connectivity, of millions of people hurtling around the planet at every moment, is no longer theoretical. Aviation did not create Covid-19, but it did turn a local outbreak into a global catastrophe. Unrestricted aviation is the great multiplier of pandemic risk — and that can’t be ignored anymore.

Aviation policy cannot go on as if none of this has happened. There’s Heathrow expansion, for instance, the business case for which now lies in tatters. Though a major asset, Heathrow is also a liability, a vast generator of congestion and pollution lodged in the side of our most populous city. The idea that we’d make it bigger is not just absurd, but grotesque.

Boris was right for the wrong reason, we need to move our main airport to a coastal location — but to provide room for containment, not expansion. Protection against future pandemics depends on the ability to close our borders as and when required. Ports, airports and logistical hubs need to be designed around this objective — incorporating the facilities required for advanced border control, mass medical testing and, if necessary, the quarantine of returning travellers.

As devastating as this pandemic has been, we need to remember it could have been worse — and that there’s absolutely no guarantee that the next one won’t be. But I wonder whether we’ve really learned our lesson.

We’ve been taught to despise humility, to disregard our limits. Like Jesus tempted by Satan in the wilderness, we’ve been taken to a high place and shown “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour”. We’ve come to believe that they belong to us, that they must lie within our grasp.

But we live a different world now and for most of us that means a smaller world. Because that’s what happens when we overreach.

When our local, fairly porous version of the Covid lockdown began, suddenly there were more hikers on the trails — there are few other places to go. I also see knots of two or three teenage boys out on the trail with their bikes and shovels, adding new jumps and whatnot. But now the city has declared the trails off-limits to mountain bikers, saying this is somehow made necessary by the virus. The reason offered is that “group rides increase your risk of exposure”. But groups of hikers are benign, apparently.

In the larger sweep of the pandemic’s disruptions, this is surely a minor inconvenience. But the asymmetry in the city’s response can’t but make some residents suspicious, and such suspicion is clearly a wider phenomenon at this moment. In episodes of government by crisis, some interests find themselves more aligned with officialdom than others.

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Lockdown 'relaxation' is nothing of the sort

By Adam King

To take my local case, there has long been a pattern of hikers using the levers of local government against mountain bikers, and the virus would seem to provide a fresh pretext for this. There is an aesthetic objection to all things mechanized intruding on “nature” (even on a trail system that must be maintained by chain saws and gas-powered weed whackers), and this purity is more prized by some demographics than by others. But it doesn’t present itself as an aesthetic preference; instead it gets moralised as a concern for safety, or as environmental responsibility. To invoke these concerns is to don a bullet-proof halo of public-spiritedness.

Yet the costs of maximal deference to such concerns fall more heavily on some than on others. This makes virtue a little too easy. I haven’t yet seen hikers out there with shovels maintaining their own trails, as the mountain bikers do, or clearing fallen trees that bock the path. The English philosopher John Locke said that it is by mixing one’s labour with the land that one gains a just title to use it.

Because of the virus, the teenage mountain bikers find themselves expelled from the supervised social setting of school. To judge from the conversations I have overheard as they stop to survey a jump from the top of a ridiculously steep incline, and their exultations at the bottom, they have formed what the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga called a “play community.” Such a community sets its own challenges and adopts its own rules, internal to a group of players who set themselves apart from the larger community. At once rivals and friends, their typical talk consists of boasts and playful insults as they goad one another on to new levels of risk and skill, from which emerge new expressions of creativity. Huizinga found in such scenes the wellsprings of civilization.

But these same scenes present an affront to the organs of social control. There would seem to be an inherent tension between the spirit of play and “safetyism” (I parse this tension more fully in my book Why We Drive, which will be published in the UK in July, with the subtitle On Risk, Freedom and Taking Back Control). Safetyism is a disposition that has been gaining strength for decades and is having a triumphal moment just now because of the virus. Public health, one of many institutions that speak on behalf of safety, has claimed authority to sweep aside whole domains of human activity as reckless, and therefore illegitimate.

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It's worth taking a risk over Covid-19

By Timandra Harkness

I suspect the ease with which we have lately accepted the authority of health experts to reshape the contours of our common life is due to the fact that safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. At the level of bureaucratic grasping, we can note that emergency powers are seldom relinquished once the emergency has passed. Together, these dynamics make up a kind of ratchet mechanism that moves in only one direction, tightening against the human spirit.

Acquiescence in this appears to be most prevalent among the meritocrats who staff the managerial layer of society. Deferring to expert authority is a habit inculcated in the “knowledge economy”, naturally enough; the basic currency of this economy is epistemic prestige.

Among those who work in the economy of things, on the other hand, you see greater skepticism toward experts (whether they make their claim on epistemic or moral grounds) and less readiness to accept the adjustment of social norms by fiat ­– whether that means using new pronouns or wearing surgical masks. I am regularly in welding supply stores, auto parts stores and other light-industry venues. Nobody is wearing masks in these places. They are very small businesses: an environment largely free of the moral fashions and corresponding knowledge claims that set the tone in large organisations. There is no HR in a welding shop.

A pandemic is a deadly serious business. But we would do well to remember that bureaucracies have their own interests, quite apart from the public interest that is their official brief and warrant. They are very much in the business of tending and feeding the narratives that justify their existence. Further, given the way bureaucracies must compete for funding from the legislature, each must make a maximal case for the urgency of its mission, hence the necessity of its expansion, like a shark that must keep moving or die. It is clearer now than it was a few months ago that this imperative of expansion puts government authority in symbiosis with the morality of safetyism, which similarly admits no limit to its expanding imperium. The result is a moral-epistemic apparatus in which experts are to rule over citizens conceived as fragile incompetents.

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How likely are you to die of coronavirus?

By Tom Chivers

But what if this apparatus were revealed to be not very serious about safety, the very ideal that underwrites its authority? What then?

What if, say, the leadership of WHO and of the public health bodies of the EU were determined to manage  Covid in the crucial, early stages of the pandemic in a way that is compatible with liberal internationalism (hence no travel restrictions), doesn’t offend China (hence no travel restrictions) and affirms our own anti-racism (hence no travel restrictions), even at the expense of arresting the spread of the virus?

What if, in the crucial early stages of the emergency, county health authorities in California, as well as the state’s Department of Education, indeed the whole institutional chorus, were more concerned with preventing “stigma” than with preventing, you know, mass death by asphyxiation?

What if the governor of California were to hold a press conference at the end of April to chastise people going to the beach in Orange County (a Republican hold-out in what is otherwise nearly a one-party state), days after we learned that sunshine kills the virus? What if police are so enterprising as to come out onto the water to arrest solo paddle boarders, but the confined spaces of libraries are re-opened?

We can’t help noticing that libraries are one of those public facilities favoured by… well, by the same people who find hiking virtuous and mountain biking reckless and egotistical.

One further word about beach closings. We see photos taken lengthwise down the beach with telephoto lenses, which has the effect of compressing the depth of field and making the beach look very crowded. The same scenes photographed from above show people keeping a good distance apart, for the most part. But they are not reproduced in the prestige press.

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The WHO has failed us again

By Ian Birrell

What if, while all this is going on, the most “responsible” voices in the news media dedicate themselves to transforming every factual ambiguity and rival model of the disease into an occasion for political warfare? For example, when Trump, in his clumsy way, repeats what he has heard about doctors experimenting with a low-risk malaria drug to treat Covid, the whole apparatus springs into action to heap opprobrium upon a chemical substance, openly hoping for the experiment’s failure, and calls this Science. But when some other doctors, “quickly acting on their hunches,” try giving men oestrogen to fight the virus, this, according to the New York Times, is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking required by the crisis.

One could go on indefinitely noting such asymmetries. They seem to form a pattern, and the upshot of the pattern is that the voices of the safety-industrial complex seem to defer automatically to the arbiters of high-prestige opinion, who are fully invested these days in political warfare against an avatar of evil, and against the half of the population who voted for him. They seem less concerned with the health of the whole populace than with drawing boundaries between the good people and the bad people, along lines that are by now all too familiar.[1.  On 1 May, the New York Times featured a slide show at the top of its homepage with eight images of Covid. Of these, four showed persons of color in the developing world wearing masks, in scenes tinged with despair yet showing heroic mutual care. One more was of a lonely transit worker disinfecting the New York subway, acting in the public interest. The remaining three showed the following: 1. Mask-less white males in a gym in the backward state of Georgia, lifting weights — to maintain their toxic masculinity, presumably. 2.  A telephoto-crowded beach in Orange County littered with careless, mask-less people frolicking in a sea of white privilege. 3.  A sputtering redneck in Michigan, again maskless, confronting a line of masked police and no doubt spewing the ‘rona straight into their faces. However novel the novel Corona virus may be, the objective of the Nation’s Newspaper of Record appears to be to fold this emergency into the longstanding pseudo-emergency of race that has been their pole star since about 2014.]

Suppose this pattern were widely noticed. It is likely the pandemic would heighten the crisis of public authority that has been unfolding for some years now in the West. I recently heard David Brooks, one of our most prominent talking heads, express on National Public Radio his hope that the pandemic would give a comeuppance to all those populist haters of institutions, by showing us how important the institutions of public health are.

By all means, let us defer to technocratic competence in times of emergency. The suspicion, however, is that the leadership of “public health” (as opposed to actual doctors and nurses) doesn’t, in fact, take its bearings from the apolitical ideal of technocratic competence. Rather, they appear as party cadres labouring on behalf of the regime of liberal internationalism. Theirs appears to be the worldview expressed by John Lennon in his infantile song ‘Imagine’, or by Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace.

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Would you take a coronavirus risk?

By Tom Chivers

To recommend restrictions on travel from China in the early stages of the pandemic would have been ideologically impossible for the WHO, regardless of what epidemiology might dictate. Utopian ideals are not only compatible with callousness about actual human lives, they sometimes demand it — the main thing is to maintain one’s own moral purity. This presents an easy opportunity for a Chinese regime that neither believes in Kant nor listens to John Lennon, but understands perfectly well how a rival society based on abstractions and taboos can be manipulated: accuse various EU functionaries of racism and, voilà, they suppress their own report that details the Chinese Communist Party’s misinformation campaign about the virus.

There would seem some affinity between safetyism and political correctness. Recall the mountain bikers with their jumps. Does putting one’s body at risk in confrontations with the material world strengthen the reality principle in a person’s psyche? There is a certain rude immediacy to physical pain that has a revelatory effect; a broken bone chastises any conceit you may have had that you had a complete grasp of the situation. Political correctness, on the other hand, seems to be an effort to avoid the pollution that comes from noticing reality. This is certainly the safer course, for anyone whose professional life takes place in an institution. It is easiest to maintain this diligence against reality if one remains insulated from those ugly causal chains that unfold in the real world — perhaps as a result of one’s own diktats, if one is highly placed.

Because of our isolation under lockdown, communication between citizens is now more dependent on online platforms than ever. The captains of Silicon Valley are not in an indulgent mood. The CEO of YouTube has declared that “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy” and therefore suppressed. Bad advice from misinformed people on the internet is a genuine problem, so one could make a convincing case for some such policy. At the same time, it is clearly also true that this episode of government by emergency has further whetted an appetite for control that has been blossoming among the Good People in the West. Two law professors now declare in The Atlantic that “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.”

The pandemic has revealed a growing affinity between Western institutional players and the authoritarian Chinese regime. It is easy to forget that the CCP was once a highly ideological organisation. Today it is basically a crime syndicate that looks upon the norms of “the international community” the way the Sinaloa Cartel might look upon the Girl Scouts.

So the question is, will our ruling apparatus follow a similar trajectory as the pandemic gives them a taste of extended emergency power? At what point do the ceremonies of political correctness become a mere façade, a set of dogmas that nobody actually believes, but which make a useful instrument of social control?

For most of us, this is entirely sensible. In developed countries, healthy people are very unlikely to die before retirement age. If you’re under 60, the chance of somebody your age dying in the next year is less than one in a hundred, and that includes the skydivers, the trawlermen, and those with serious health conditions. For women, your cohort won’t hit the 1% mortality rate till your 70th birthday. In your twenties, the risk of not reaching another birthday is less than one in a thousand, even including the idiots who drive too fast, take illegal drugs, and fall off things while taking a final selfie.

But that was pre-Covid-19. Now, young nurses are dying horrible deaths, and daily briefings from the Government come adorned with hazard warning signs: Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives. The majority of Britons are not only happy to comply with lockdown rules, but are in favour of continuing them for the foreseeable future.

According to an Ipsos Mori opinion poll at the beginning of May, around two-thirds of UK residents would not feel comfortable using public transport or going to bars or restaurants, even if the government said they could. More than a third are not keen to send their children back to school, and nearly a third don’t want to go back to work. It’s not easy to go from existential terror to a balanced approach to personal risk.

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If you want to get ahead, take a risk

By Timandra Harkness

There’s still too much we don’t know about coronavirus. But we now have enough UK, as well as international, data to see some patterns emerge. For example, the general rule that average risk of death doubles every eight years after childhood is mirrored by the danger to people who catch Covid-19. Your chance of dying if infected also doubles every eight years.

Professor David Spiegelhalter, of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, describes catching Covid-19 as “packing what amounts to your current annual risk into a few weeks”: whatever your risk of dying in the next 12 months, you add the same risk again as a one-off event.

You could think of this in the same way as going skydiving, which brings a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying with every jump. A woman in her twenties could double her annual risk with three jumps. For a man in his forties, it’s 20-odd jumps. If you land safely every time, the risk is over and you are back to your normal, underlying risk levels.

“This is an additional risk, of course,” says Spiegelhalter, “and certainly does not mean that these deaths would have occurred anyway in the following year (although some would have).”

If you were not worried about the prospect of your own death as you cut your last birthday cake, because life experience or familiarity with statistics told you that few people like you would die before you got to do this again, you should also view Covid-19 as a minor risk to you, personally. If you are not in a higher risk category, doubling a very small chance still gives you a very small chance.

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The risks of scaremongering

By Tom Chivers

But there is much more to risk than mathematics. We play roulette, but not Russian Roulette, because the stakes are infinitely higher. Existential, in fact.

We wear seat belts, though we hope we’ll never need one to save our life. We observe speed limits while driving, more or less, because we know that breaking them could endanger unknown others more than ourselves. We view the morality of taking risks that affect others, like unwittingly hitting a frailer person with a Volvo or a virus, more severely than taking risks on our own behalf.

Personal willingness to accept risks varies. As a motorcyclist, I am not happy to say that an average 100 mile journey gives me a 12 in a million risk of dying. Though I comfort myself by thinking that as I am neither an under-experienced moped rider approaching a junction, nor an over-confident middle-aged man taking a powerful sports bike around a left-hand bend, I have avoided the two riskiest situations. In a car, I would be 100 times safer. Nevertheless, I continue to ride a motorcycle.

You may be more of a Volvo driver than a motorcyclist, willing to forego pleasure, freedom and opportunity in return for enhanced safety. To you, one Covid-19 bullet in a chamber of 1,000 holes may still sound too many. Comfort yourself by comparing that risk to others you take all the time without worrying. Like riding a motorcycle for 10,000 miles, doing 100 skydiving jumps, or living another year.

It’s also true that in a pandemic we are often acting to reduce risks to others more than to ourselves. By staying at home we have been slowing the rate of infection, and keeping demand for medical treatment below a threshold the NHS could manage. Just as we adhere to 20mph speed limits for the benefit of children and cyclists, we have (mostly) been willing to endure lockdown to help our more susceptible neighbours and relatives avoid serious illness.

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Boris must be bold: it could save lives

By Ian Birrell

But we don’t impose 20mph speed limits on motorways. Reducing all transport speed that drastically would save more lives, but impose vast costs in human time, spent on motorways instead of doing all the things that make life worthwhile. As a consequence, economic costs would make anything involving road transport far more expensive; congestion and pollution would rise as vehicles crawled along; civilisation itself would slow down.

We don’t close down the whole road transport network in order to save a few thousand lives every year. We recognise, as a society and as individuals, that the benefits of road transport are proportional to the risks. We try to make it safer, but we accept a degree of risk for ourselves and others whenever we travel by road.

Coronavirus has already claimed ten times as many lives as the roads do each year in Britain. If current measures work well, the total death toll may be similar to that of seasonal flu. If not, it may be closer to heart disease, still the leading cause of death in the UK, at one in ten of all deaths each year.

Nevertheless, we would have done better to talk about Covid-19 more like road accidents, as a risk that can’t be eliminated altogether, but can be mitigated. Instead, the Government invoked the language of existential threat, in the face of which no measure is too great. Now, weighing the risks of resuming more normal life against the risks of continuing in suspended animation, they are struggling to coax a fearful population out of lockdown.

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Coronavirus is the wake-up call we need

By TOm Chivers

It’s easy to turn on the tap of fear as a motivational force, and much harder to switch it off in the absence of concrete reassurance. But the Government could have foreseen that we would need to resume more normal activity before any medical breakthrough could reduce the risk of Covid-19 to zero. Why did they not use the language of risk to communicate their policies, and the thinking behind them?

Risk is a useful and much misused idea.

We tend to view it as a symptom of the terrifying uncertainty of the world, instead of as a way to analyse, even quantify, that uncertainty, in order to decide and act. It’s most often invoked against taking actions with unknown consequences, which in practice means any new or experimental action. We tend to see it as a state of existence beyond our control, something that happens to us rather than an action we decide to take — being At Risk, not taking a risk.

We would do better to see risk as an unavoidable aspect of life, often an opportunity to explore the unknown and find new possibilities. Without our forebears taking physical risks we would not have aeroplanes (now the safest way to travel), or vaccination (which we hope will be our way out of the coronavirus trap).

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Voters don't need protecting from political ads

By Timandra Harkness

Instead of trying to frighten us all into staying at home, the Government should have harnessed our altruism, inviting us to join a grown-up conversation about risk. That would have left the door open to invite us all, now, to weigh the risk of Covid-19 against the lost opportunities of continuing to hide from the world.

For some, that will mean personally deciding to take risks in order to get society moving again. For most, those additional risks will be small, probably less than a daily bacon sandwich habit, or motorcycling to work to avoid the train.

For all of us, it means accepting that to be human is to live in a risky world, where we must act without perfect knowledge of the consequences of our actions. Mathematics can help us put our fears in perspective, but the only thing that will let us take control of risk is courage.

Human beings constantly take risks for causes beyond themselves, whether that’s protecting the weak or trying to achieve great things. We call those people heroes. Today, we urgently need to rediscover our appetite for heroism, for taking calculated risks, and for valuing something higher than staying safe.

The assumptions behind the epidemiology. The timing of the lockdown. Test and trace. The question of masks. The medical preparations. The economic rescue plan. You name it, the policy is probably way off.

But in what direction, I couldn’t tell you. Nor can anyone else — yet. It’s called the novel coronavirus for a reason. We’ve never faced a disease quite like it before. We’ve never shut down the economy before. This is uncharted territory and every government in the world is blundering about trying to find a way through.

So how much blame does our government deserve for the mistakes that it has made, is making and will make?

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Which epidemiologist do you believe?

By Freddie Sayers

I hope that one day we’ll have the luxury of looking back on all of this as a historical event, not an evolving crisis. We’ll then have the time and space for royal commissions, public inquiries and all the rest of it. No doubt the 20:20 hindsight brigade will be out in force. So will the vulture press, picking over the bones — and looking for fresh meat too. Heads will be called for and, I fear, sacrifices offered up. My hope, however, is that we’ll be less interested in the what, when and who of the mistakes, and more interested in the why.

Where the explanation is one of incomplete information and limited options we need to be forgiving — always asking ourselves if we would have done any better in the same circumstances. I also suspect that the worst errors are rooted in a culture of government for which there can be no scapegoats because it’s goats all the way down.

These are the errors that come not from too little information, but from too few sources of advice, not enough experimentation, insufficient verification, and an unwillingness to admit to mistakes or to change course. In his interview with UnHerd, the epidemiologist Neil Ferguson said that “there’s a tendency to become wedded to a position you’ve taken and find it difficult to revise views in terms of new evidence coming forward”.

This applies as much to politics as it does to science. And perhaps especially to political decisions made on the basis of scientific advice (given the gravity of what’s being decided).

With great power comes great responsibility — and I’ve no doubt that our leaders do feel responsible. You can see the weight of it etched on their faces. But it is not the only thing they need to feel. Power must also be tempered by humility. And that’s what I sense is missing here — if not from the soul of each and every minister, then from the culture of government (and politics and journalism) in which they operate.

True humility is not cowering passivity, but a recognition of the radical uncertainties that we have to live with. It is only once we’ve understood that reality that we begin to act appropriately — by accepting that most of what we do will be wrong to some extent, and therefore actively seeking out evidence of that wrongness. It’s only on such a basis that we can put a stop to what doesn’t work and learn from what does (no matter whose idea it was in the first place). Above all, we must keep our options open. The worst thing we can do, especially when faced with huge but unknowable risks, is to make one big bet on being right.

And yet that’s exactly what our system of government encourages our politicians to do.

*

Systems, of course, can be reformed — but there’s one thing that never changes and that’s the corrupting effect of power itself.

In Nineteen-Eighty-Four, George Orwell showed us what power at its most corrupt looks like. These are the chilling words of O’Brien, the secret policeman who breaks poor Winston Smith:

“Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

The context of the novel is the totalitarian state of Oceania. Our own situation, despite the lockdown, is a far cry from that grim parallel universe. Power, as exercised in a democracy, is thankfully not absolute — and thus neither is the corruption that follows in its wake.

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Tolkien's guide to contemporary politics

By Peter Franklin

Indeed, power is often illusory — our leaders are more Wizard of Oz than Big Brother. Nevertheless, the Orwellian idea of power for its own sake is still relevant to the smoke and mirrors of post-modern politics.

Let’s imagine O’Brien not as a member of the thought police, but as a comms consultant in our world. This is how he might describe our system of government:

“One doesn’t use whatever power one has to do something; one does something to show that one has power.”

What that something is — be it an ‘eye-catching initiative’, a full-blown government strategy or even something genuinely important like a single currency or a foreign war — doesn’t really matter. What counts is not so much the destination as that the wheels have been set in motion: the civil servants have something to implement; the press officers have something to press release; the journalists have something to report; the parliamentarians something to debate. Everyone, if not happy, is at least occupied — and none more so that the minister, standing over the machinery of government, lever proudly in hand.

Policy-makers do love their ‘levers’. And politicians love to pull them. In fact, they’re always on the pull — looking for some simple way to make something happen and therefore look like they’re in control.

In the UK, no department is keener on its levers than the Treasury. And no wonder — in no part of government is there a more reliably mechanistic correspondence between a ministerial decision and some meaningful result. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer raises or lowers this or that tax, then up or down it goes. If he decides to borrow more money, it gets borrowed. If he wants to cut expenditure, it gets cut.

But much, if not most, of what government does or tries to do is not like that. There’s no direct relationship between a decision made in Whitehall and an outcome in the real world. An education minister may try to boost literacy, a Home Office minister try to crack down on knife crime; but though money might be allocated to the chosen objective and new powers legislated for, there’s no guarantee that an actual difference will be made. The government machinery doesn’t always connect with the facts on the ground. Indeed, forget the real world: bureaucratic inertia can disconnect the machine itself from its levers — leaving ministers pulling away to no effect.

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Did anyone predict coronavirus?

By Tom Chivers

In recent decades, governments have become obsessed with ‘delivery’ — with making sure that the machine does respond. As part of this we’ve seen the Treasury taking an increasingly assertive role in the work of the spending departments — as if the lever-pulling magic of fiscal and monetary policy can somehow rub off on those parts of government whose writ runs beyond spreadsheets. Under Boris Johnson, we’ve seen the Downing Street operation take effective control of the Treasury — as if to ensure that control over the state is ultimately exerted from Number 10 not Number 11.

*

The great problem with this focus on levers and delivery is that it shrinks perspectives to internal workings of the machine — instead of looking at it from the outside and asking questions about the system as a whole.

Obviously, there’s the question of centralisation versus localisation. If you want to make changes across the country, can you really do it via a machine that is remotely controlled from Whitehall? But there’s an even more important question than that. And what it asks is not ‘where?’ but ‘how?’. Fundamentally, the machinery of government can be configured to operate in one of two basic ways: the first is to implement what works (as reckoned by those in charge); the second is to find out what doesn’t work. Decision versus discovery.

There’s no doubt which approach our political culture prefers. As Nigel Lawson once put it, “to govern is to decide”. But on what basis should one decide? Historical precedent? Political expediency? Ideological prejudice?

How about experimentation instead? Why not redesign the machinery of government to systematically test many solutions to a problem, as opposed to the current configuration, which is about imposing just one. It is surely easier to see what doesn’t work in practice, than to guess what does in theory — and thus, by a process of elimination, get closer to the answer.

Why isn’t government massively more experimental? Is it a question of expense — a lack of time or the money? No — because as long as we fail fast and fail small (through lots of local experiments), we can minimise the downside (and subsequently maximise the upside by making the most of what was found to work). Rather, the real reason why we stick to the one-shot, top-down style of policymaking is a political culture in which you can’t be the ‘big man’ unless you take big decisions.

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And thus the machinery of government is engineered around the amplification of ego. Each part of the mechanism is valued and incentivised according to how well it serves this ultimate purpose. The flow of information back up the chain of command, which should be about revealing reality, instead responds to what the top of the chain wants to hear: confirmation that the right lever was pulled in the first place.

*

A prime example of this institutionalised confirmation bias was the original Troubled Families programme. This was launched by David Cameron in the wake of the riots of August 2011. At the time, there was enormous pressure on the Government to ‘do something’ — and the programme was the main response. Its purpose was to reduce truancy, anti-social behaviour, worklessness and other social problems thought to be concentrated among a targeted group of 120,000 households. It was rolled-out across the country, with hundreds of millions of pounds of funding.

By 2015, the Programme was reporting a remarkable level of success — with 98.9% of the troubled families supposedly having had their lives “turned around”. But, then, in 2016, an independent evaluation by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research surfaced, which was “unable to find consistent evidence that the programme had any significant or systematic impact.”

Payment by results was meant to provide the right incentives for providers (in this case, local government). But thanks to vague criteria, success could be declared (and payment collected) in most circumstances. In its very design, the programme was self-confirming.

It was also a huge wasted opportunity. Local delivery could have facilitated local experimentation with a variety of different approaches, involving a variety of different public, private and voluntary sector providers. But that would have made the Government — the Prime Minister in particular — look less decisive. The results would have been mixed, with some experiments failing completely. No doubt, the media would have portrayed each negative or mediocre result as a fiasco or even a scandal rather than as knowledge gained. As for any successes, those would have been seized upon as evidence of a postcode lottery — patchy provision privileging some communities over others.

Politically, it’s less risky for government to roll out one big approach across the nation, especially if its eventual failure doesn’t become apparent until long after the media has lost interest. Indeed nothing could be more risky than the fail fast approach of effective policy experimentation, because that generates news while the media is still paying attention.

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Housing is another example of a policy area where localisation could allow a wide range of different approaches — and where outcomes are readily measured and compared (houses are big and thus easily counted). But, astonishingly, this most place-based of political issues is still driven by demonstrably useless central government policies like the wretched Help to Buy scheme. Imagine if those resources had been made available to local authorities, housing associations and other potential innovators with a brief to try out literally groundbreaking ideas.

In some areas of policy we do see government taking forward a number of different approaches to a particular challenge. For instance, with energy policy, government has thrown its weight behind the development and deployment of a broad spectrum of power generating technologies. That’s good, but what’s less good is that policy doesn’t proceed to the next stage, which would be a robust evaluation of the different options, so that we can weed out the ones that don’t perform as well as the others. Instead, we see government stubbornly persist with projects like new nuclear power stations, despite the eye-watering costs and the availability of cheaper alternatives.

Because pulling the plug on a project looks like failure — and therefore an admission of weakness — expensive mistakes have a tendency to get more expensive and thus even harder to admit to. This is why evidence of failure is less likely to be sought out and may even be suppressed. At the very least, we can expect the chain of command — configured as it to the delivery of the big man’s big decisions, not to ask awkward questions.

*

How much this all applies to the Government’s handling of the corona-crisis remains to be seen.

When we eventually look back on the decisions that have been made, the most important question we can ask is not whether they turned out to be right or wrong — but whether, in Professor Ferguson’s words, the decision-makers “revised their views in terms of new evidence coming forward”.

It’s on this basis that our leaders and their advisors should be judged. Of course, so far, it is too early to tell. But if the verdict of history is a good one, it will be despite, not because of, our culture of government.

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It is only in the most extreme circumstances that people, stripped bare of the veneer of civilisation, show their true natures. A crisis like the present one brings out the best, and the worst of the humanity. We are tested in the fire. In this case, not the purifying fire of war but the ouchy burny fire of staying at home with our spouses and children for ages and having to play boardgames because we feel guilty about too much screen time. And real characters emerge, thus, according to our favoured boardgames.

Risk

Risk is great fun. You get to try to take over the world. You build armies, squash your enemies, and eventually dominion is yours. There’s a bit of strategy in it, a lot of aggression, and more than just a soupçon of chance: if a few dice rolls go against you, your magnificent army is suddenly a lot less magnificent and, oh crap, there goes Russia. It’s a game, really, for people who want to have kind of a lazy and consequence-free shot at taking over the world, have a bash and hope for the best. Steve Bannon, say, or the Prime Minister.

Diplomacy

Another world domination game, Diplomacy is much subtler and better than Risk. With Diplomacy you can’t just hole up in South East Asia and build an impregnable defensive army in some Pacific island bottleneck. And there is no element of chance. Every territory on the board can house only one military unit – so the game’s essence is in strategic horse-trading with other players in secret conferences in, for instance, the spare bedroom. Then, of course, comes the opening of the sealed orders in which it emerges that everybody has betrayed absolutely everybody else. Henry Kissinger is very good at this game. Michael Gove thinks he’s good at it but isn’t. Gavin Williamson knows he is hopeless, but wants to play with the bigger boys anyway. 

Scrabble

Nobody who seriously plays Scrabble nourishes the illusion that it’s a game for people with good vocabularies and imaginative ideas for unusual words: rather, it favours vicious sadists and pedants who have memorised a complete list of the allowable two and three-letter words (most of which look like a fat-thumb error on a QWERTY keyboard) and who are determined to deploy them in the most pinched and obstructive way possible. You’re thinking: “Wouldn’t it be lovely to make ‘BANANA’ with my two blanks!” They’re thinking: “Good. If I play QG sideways that will spoil the triple-word for everyone else.” I have a hunch Priti Patel plays a mean game of Scrabble, pun intended.

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Cluedo

It’s a game about logic, really, isn’t it? I mean, what are you doing just drifting from room to room making random guesses? You idiot! Now you’ve got the player to your left showing you Professor Plum again: a totally wasted suggestion! Look, I know it looks like a bit of fun to you but actually I think you’ll find there are any number of optimal strategy guides available in the rationalist blogosphere. Oh — you what? Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the billiard room? Dear me. Well let’s have a look. You fluky BASTARD: I know from my notes that it was a 17-2 chance against you guessing correctly and now you’ve won — which is sad, actually. A senior government source is very good at this game but still always loses.

Monopoly

The attractions of this game to the egotistical, plutocratically minded and unimaginative are obvious enough just from the name. It’s all about money — and about winning by getting all of it. It is also notable for three other features of its gameplay. Once you’ve established a commanding lead, it gets easier and easier, just like real capitalism. Cheats almost always prosper, and people who win at Monopoly almost always cheat, just like real capitalism. And Mayfair is expensive and crap, just like real capitalism. This is the ideal game for the Sir Philip Green in your life.

Trivial Pursuit

This game is a particularly interesting psychological test, not because it attracts pub quiz bores (though it does), but because of the design of the game itself. Ignore the idiotic questions about the litreage of Lake Titicaca or Ginger Spice’s bra: the mechanism is irrelevant. The point is that it is a very long game. It lasts at least twice as long as it takes for everyone around the table to be bored to tears as they make a 65th attempt at getting that orange piece of pie. The team in the lead doesn’t want to stop, though, because they think they’re going to win; and the losing teams can’t give up for fear of looking ungracious. Mind-forg’d manacles, right there: chaining you to the table. It’s the game for god-tier passive-aggressive monsters. Theresa May is the sort of person, I’d suspect, who’d finish a game of Triv. 

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Bridge

“No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe,” wrote John Donne. He was almost certainly thinking about the game of bridge when this insight occurred to him. Here is a game in which partnership and communication are everything. It is a game in which ruthless killer instincts are couched in extreme courtesy, and if you exclaim “Three no trumps are you out of your tiny mind?” at your partner it will be distinctly frowned on by your opponents. Glory is shared in bridge, as is ignominy. Suitable only for happily married couples with an intellectual rapport such as Ant and Dec, Dr Evil and Mini-Me, or Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid.  

Catan

The game for policy nerds. You are encouraged to build a civilisation, gathering and allocating resources, building infrastructure, and basically doing all the stuff that for most of us seems to be rather ruled out by the word “game”. If you’re the sort of person who’d rather muse on the parameters of short-term outlay versus medium-term economic growth implied by HS2, go wild. You are likely to find yourself playing Catan with earnest, slightly thyroidal young men from free-market think tanks or, if you’re specially lucky, George Osborne. 

Cranium

This is the game for your flamboyant uncle and your tipsy mum who misses karaoke. It’s a game for the high-spirited and giggly and creatively inclined and slightly showy-offy. Why master chess when you can measure out the rest of your life in 45 second bursts, trying to hum the Wombles theme tune or make a recognisable three-dimensional image of Ann Widdecombe out of a thumb-sized piece of orange Play-Doh? Davina McCall is undoubtedly excellent at Cranium, as — secretly — is Jeremy Corbyn. 

Snakes and Ladders

It’s entirely random, snakes and ladders. It barely qualifies as a game at all. With poker, say, you’re surfing the waves of chance with on-the-hoof calculations of probabilities, all tempered with psychological acumen. With snakes and ladders it’s more like: yeah, rolled a six. I won. Woo. Or: yeah, rolled a four. Back down the ladder for me. Like, curses. Your turn. Accordingly, it is the preferred game of existentialist philosophers. Also, toddlers.

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It seems relevant, now we’re in lockdown. I’d been thinking about it a lot recently with all the images of Columbia Road Flower Market, and the Tube, and various Norfolk coastal resorts, all rammed with people. Presumably those photos were taken by humans who were at the time in Columbia Road Flower Market, or on the Tube. You’re not in a crowd; you are a crowd. No doubt you have excellent reasons for being there, but no doubt so does everyone else. Hence, I presume, the lockdown.

It’s the same with panic-buying (with the caveat that true “panic-buying” and major stockpiling probably isn’t actually going on very much, as the excellent Stephen Bush of the New Statesman points out). In a chemist’s near my house, a parent was grumbling that all the Calpol had gone: “It’s so selfish. What if my kid gets ill?” But, of course, everyone else is thinking the exact same thing; that’s why there are no Calpols.

These concerns all map on very neatly to game theory, and specifically to the game-theory ideas known as “coordination problems”. The most famous two are probably the “prisoners’ dilemma” and the “tragedy of the commons”.

In the prisoners’ dilemma, two people are suspected of a crime, and are locked up separately. The police have enough evidence to convict them on a lesser charge, but they’re told – separately – that if they grass up their accomplice, the accomplice will get a longer sentence and they will go free. Of course, if they both turn grass, then they’ll both get long sentences (but these won’t be as long as if they were to stay schtum while their buddy narks on them).

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The options are called “cooperate” (with your accomplice) or “defect”. So if you both cooperate, you get one year. If you both defect, you get two years. But if you defect and your accomplice cooperates, you walk free and they get three years (and vice versa).

Obviously, the best outcome from the point of view of minimising the total number of years served is for both to cooperate. You each serve one year; it’s just two years in total. But if you know your buddy is going to cooperate, it’s best to defect, because then you get away.

But your buddy knows that too! So he will defect. But then: if he defects, it’s still best for you to defect, so you get two years rather than three.

So even though you both could have got out after one year by cooperating, the optimal, “rational” (in the economic sense) decision is always to defect, so you end up serving two years. (Watch this gameshow clip for a remarkably dramatic demonstration; it’s so illustrative of the dilemma that it attracted academic attention.)

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The tragedy of the commons is a similar but grander-scale idea. Imagine you have some common resource: a meadow where everyone can graze their livestock. There’s enough grass to graze 100 sheep comfortably and there are 10 farmers; if everyone keeps a flock of 10, the meadow will remain healthy and the animals will have enough to eat.

But if one farmer decides to add an 11th sheep, he gains all the value of that sheep, but pays only 10% of the cost to the resource. Of course, the other farmers make the exact same calculation, so everyone puts on an 11th sheep, and a 12th. The meadow gets overgrazed; the sheep become malnourished; and everyone ends up poorer than they would have if they’d just cooperated, but everyone was acting perfectly rationally (again, in the economic sense) at every juncture.

If you could coordinate the responses of the different agents – the prisoners or the farmers – the best outcome would be easy to achieve. If the prisoners could just talk, or some authority simply ordered the farmers to stick to 10 and punished those who didn’t, that would be the end of the problem. But the prisoners can’t talk, and there’s no Farming Czar to step in.

These are just thought experiments, but they turn up in real life. In the Cold War, the USA and USSR could have spent billions of dollars/roubles on hospitals and schools and made everyone’s life better, or on lots of big missiles with nuclear bombs on the top. You can cooperate and build the schools, or you can defect and build the missiles. As the thought experiment would predict, they ended up building the missiles.

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And the parallels between the tragedy of the commons and the climate situation — it’s in everyone’s interest if we all reduce carbon use, but if you do emit carbon, you gain all the benefit of your economic activity while paying only a tiny fraction of the cost — are almost too obvious to state. (Although I did just state them anyway.) Again, if some world government were to be set up and punish countries for emitting too much, it would be simple to solve; but no real world government exists, so coordination remains hard.

In the time of the coronavirus these problems are being illustrated amazingly starkly. It’s in everyone’s interests if everyone strictly self-isolates and washes their hands 10 times a day. But these actions are costly – self-isolation is lonely, and thanks to the washing my hands at least are red and cracked and look like they’ve aged 20 years. So if everyone else were to do it, but you carried on walking around, licking lampposts, cuddling strangers and never washing your hands, just as normal, then you’d gain all the benefit of that while (assuming you’re relatively young and healthy) paying only a fraction of the increased risk.

Similarly, it’s in everyone’s best interests if we all agree to only buy one bottle of Calpol so the shelves are always full – but if you don’t trust other people to do that, it’s in your interest to buy extra, to make sure you have some. So everyone buys more than they need, spending too much money, and other people end up with none, even though there’s enough to go around.

That’s before you get into the utilitarian calculus: the moral mathematics of “if I do X, it will probably cause X good things but Y bad things; is X bigger or smaller than Y?” Doctors are going to have to decide who lives and who dies. Decisions made by politicians will do the same, and not always as obviously as you might think; Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, points out that during the Ebola crisis, more people died of malaria than the actual epidemic, because all the resources that would have been directed to curing them went to stopping the spread of the disease. 

But even on a personal level, we are going to have to make those sorts of decisions. If I take my children to the park — even if I am incredibly careful — I am slightly increasing the risk that they or I will pass on the disease. There is a small but non-zero chance that someone will die because of that decision. But if I don’t take them to the park, their lives will very probably be slightly worse. How do you trade low-probability but high-impact events off against high-probability, low-impact ones like that? How many days at the park is worth one death? The answer is not “infinity”; we don’t think that lives are infinitely valuable. We take small risks of terrible things happening all the time, in order for nice things to very likely happen: we cross the road to the restaurant, we drive to the seaside.

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Now, though, those decisions are being made starkly obvious. And the awful thing is that sometimes it is rational, on the utilitarian calculus. If your children gain +10 Happiness Points from going to the park, someone dying is worth -100,000 Happiness Points, and the risk of someone dying from your specific actions is 0.005%, then since 0.005% of -100,000 is -5, the park visit is worth it. How do you factor that in, when you’re already struggling to overcome the Molochian trap of the coordination problem?

I should admit: at the weekend, we took our children to a local park, moved as far away from others as we could, and played football and frisbee just between the four of us. Around us – at a distance – we could see dozens of others, all slowly moving around in their families or other groups. It looked like everyone was horribly aware of the utilitarian trade-off they were making, even if they weren’t thinking in actual numbers. 

Millions of people around the country have been finding themselves in the middle of a massive multiplayer game of something like the coordination problems described above, played for real-world stakes of lives and happiness. People are having to try to work out what the right thing to do is, and sometimes having to do the right thing even though it is technically irrational — it will have worse outcomes for that person whatever everyone else does. I don’t blame them for not solving problems on the fly that people have spent entire PhDs on.

Coordination problems are not impossible to solve for the actors involved. The Cold War ended; progress has been made on carbon emissions. But it’s hard, and it takes time we don’t have. The Government’s lockdown represents the equivalent of the Farming Czar coming in and ordering everyone to cooperate. We’re not stuck in traffic, we are traffic, and right now we need the roads to be clear.

That might be an easy one for you to answer. But what about dinner four days from now, or six? The fact that many people would find that second question hard or even impossible might just tell us something about the way Britain will be changed by Covid-19.

When I started reporting on politics almost 20 years ago, Tesco and the people who shopped there every Saturday were pretty much the centre of the electoral universe. Tony Blair was almost supernaturally attuned to Tesco shoppers, their concerns about petrol prices and the rest. Tesco, driven by its big-box edge-of-town stores (which also sold petrol), was the company of the moment; even political journalists knew that one pound in every seven spent on British retail went to Tesco.

Then the financial crisis and competition in the market changed British grocers and the way we shop. People suddenly short of cash, or just worried about cash, become reluctant or unable to spend a big slice of their weekly disposable on one big shop on one day. Lidl and Aldi arrived, mostly in the centre of towns in small- and medium-sized stores, not in big boxes. Incumbent supermarkets, too, chased shoppers who wanted to shop more often, to spend smaller sums more frequently.

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Tesco tried to keep pace with consumers, with Tesco Metro, a shift that meant many things, including a reduction in staff numbers.

Essentially, Britain became a nation of just-in-time shoppers, making regular and even daily trips to the shops for that night’s dinner. A few years back, the Co-op found that 27% of us chose our evening meal on the day; only 9% of people in its survey planned their meals a week ahead.

Waitrose has also noted the death of the weekly shop​, observing that a staple of the high street is shrinking and maybe even disappearing:

“Just a few years ago, an average Waitrose would open with around 200 big trolleys and 150 shallow ‘daily shopper’ trolleys lined up outside. These days the tables have turned, with 250 shallow ‘daily shoppers’ and just 70 big trolleys needed.”

More recently, the aversion to the weekly shop and to preparing to feed ourselves has sparked a new trend in food retail: recipe boxes, where someone else plans and weighs and measures the components you need to prepare your evening meal — Hello Fresh, Gousto, Mindful Chef.

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Not only do we no longer want to fill our cupboards with food, we can’t be bothered to measure and weigh the stuff either.

This shift surely informs Britain’s response to the coronavirus emergency, and will shape the way that emergency changes us. When the crisis really hit, how many people didn’t have enough food in the fridge or cans in the cupboard to last out the 14-day isolation period Boris Johnson asked of any household with a symptomatic resident?

To anyone — and yes, the younger you are, the more likely this is to be true — who relies on that daily trip to the shop, perhaps on the way home from work, the idea of spending two weeks cut off and relying on the kindness of friends is almost inevitably daunting, even frightening.

Some might shrug and assume that online-ordered supermarket fare will arrive from a truck as ever. But the reality of two-week-long waits for a delivery slot will come as another reminder of the simple and, at times like this, terrifying fragility of modern lives predicated on just-in-time and on-demand services.

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This isn’t (just) about brittle urban millennials who won’t cope if Amazon Prime can’t get them their plant-based dinner in the next three hours. In the past week, I’ve heard two friends, middle-aged London professionals, announce that they’re buying cars for the first time. Having relied on shops walking distance away and public transport, both have abruptly decided they need the ability to drive themselves and their families to, well, anywhere else if they needed to. Maybe all that stuff that Marie Kondo persuaded us to get rid of had uses — psychological and practical — after all.

The coronovirus has reminded such people of that fragility, the feeling of security that some of us have traded away for a convenience lifestyle. How else to explain panic-buying toilet paper and dry pasta? Narrowly speaking, such actions can be rational, but a better question to ask is more fundamental: why are they necessary?

Relying on just-in-time delivery along global supply-chains to feed and clothe and support us by buying little and often is a little bit like flying. It’s a huge source of freedom and progress, but also a risk to which we deliberately blind ourselves. For many people, the only way to be comfortable with sitting in a metal box full of highly-flammable fuel 30,000 feet above the earth is not to think about the incredible number of things that have to go exactly right to make it possible — and so about the things that could go wrong.

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This, of course, is speculation, but I think the psychological impact of our empty cupboards at a time of national trauma could just be a counterweight to the widely-observed idea that the virus will renew faith in the state. I think we may well emerge from this horror with a newfound tendency towards household resilience, to the minor but important feeling of self-sufficiency, of security, that comes with a cupboard full of food. Do not be surprised if the coronavirus eventually brings the shopping trolley trundling back into the heart of our national life.

Meanwhile, when (if) we ever get back to talking seriously about Britain’s post-EU political economy, I wonder if British farmers will find it just a little bit easier to see off the “Singapore” Brexiteers who wonder if we couldn’t do without them and just import more of what we eat. Of course we could, but could we ever feel comfortable doing so? I’d bet on shorter, stronger supply chains coming into fashion on the other side of the emergency.

And for Ms Kondo, perhaps a well-stocked house does not always spark joy but it does come in handy at times like these. Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are no minimalists in a time of plague.

Writing for UnHerd last month, Tom Chivers urged us not to panic. Since then we’ve had three weeks of further developments, some of them deeply worrying. Entire cities are on lockdown, thousands of people are sick and hundreds have died — including Li Wenliang, one of the brave doctors who alerted the world to the outbreak.

Nevertheless, Tom is probably right — this won’t be the next Black Death.

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Test article

By Tom Chivers

But even if the danger of the present crisis (or any specific outbreak) is exaggerated by the media — that doesn’t mean we’re over-reacting to the general threat from infectious disease in a globalised world.

Indeed, there are those who believe that we’ve greatly under-appreciated the danger we’re in.

Among them is Nassim Nicholas Taleb — who has done more to expose the holes in our understanding of uncertainty than anyone else in the world today. Though best known for his thinking on risk in the financial system, the fact that he sees many of the same errors at work in our understanding of disease risk is itself a wake-up call.

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So what is it we’re not understanding?

Let’s start with a concept that won’t be familiar to many people, including many scientists. It goes by the forbidding name of ‘non-ergodicity’.

Please, don’t be deterred. There is a reason why we need to get our heads around this one. In fact, our lives may depend on it.

In a complex world, we need to compress numbers so that we can make practical use of them. Averages are a great help, but they can be misleading. As Taleb puts it: “never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep” — i.e. it maybe two feet deep in some places, but a perilous six feet in others.

OK, so the idea that averages can conceal extreme possibilities isn’t too difficult to grasp. However, the specific problem of non-ergodicity isn’t quite so intuitive — if it were, we might have a shorter and less horrible word for it.

The best way to approach the concept is through an example. Taleb provides a great one here. He juxtaposes two scenarios: a casino in which 100 people are gambling at the same time; and the same casino in which one person gambles for 100 days in a row. Now what if you wanted to work out the odds on offer from the casino. One way would be to look at what happened to the hundred gamblers on their night out. Some of them will have done well and some badly. But by averaging out the losses and gain across the entire group, you’d get an idea of the odds on offer. Now here comes the crucial question: is this ‘ensemble probability’ for the large group a good guide to the likely fortunes of the single repeat gambler? One may suspect him of being a professional gambler or a gambling addict, but leave aside any such speculation and focus on the numerical facts alone. All other things being equal, are the 100 people gambling once equivalent to one person gambling a hundred times?

Intuitively, we’d be inclined to answer yes. But we’d be wrong. In calculating probabilities, the parallel experience of the 100 is not equivalent to the sequential experience of the one. In the jargon, they are non-ergodic.

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Why Antifragile is the perfect read for today's turmoil

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Why is that? Well it’s all a matter of time. The risks that the hundred gamblers take with their money exist in parallel to one another. If the unluckiest of the hundred loses so badly that she goes bankrupt, it doesn’t change the fortunes of any of the other 99. It’ll bring down their average performance a bit, but that’s all. Not so with the repeat gambler. The risks that he undertakes are sequential, not parallel. If he goes bankrupt on one of the hundred days, then the impact on the remaining days is profound. That’s because having been ruined, the gambler has no more money to gamble with and thus no chance of making up his losses.

So wherever there’s a small, but persistent risk of ruin from repeated exposures to danger, our risk assessments absolutely have to account for it. Nothing could be more important — not least because repeated exposure to extreme risk turns unthinkable scenarios into certainties over time.

The repeat emergence of new types and strains of infectious microorganism represents just such a persistent exposure to ruin. It doesn’t matter that, on average, epidemics (or even pandemics) aren’t that bad; it only takes one extinction level event and it’s game over. For this reason and others, Taleb, with his colleagues Joe Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam, argue that we must transform our thinking. When it comes to a novel pathogen like coronavirus, over-reaction is the only rational response.

*

But doesn’t the same risk-of-ruin principle apply to, say, the danger posed to our planet by passing asteroids? The danger from individual space rocks may be tiny, but over geological time we’re exposed over-and-over again, meaning that eventually a cataclysmic collision is bound to happen — just ask the dinosaurs. Given that that we accept this reality and just get on with our lives, shouldn’t we do the same as regards the possibility of an extinction level pandemic?

No, we shouldn’t — and not just because nasty diseases come round more often than nasty asteroids. Rather the key distinction is that humanity doesn’t do anything to make the danger from asteroids any worse (and there’s precious little we can do to make it better). However, with the danger from disease, the situation is altogether different.

As a species, we’re doing too many things to shorten the odds on disaster. To begin with, there’s what we’re doing to increase the likelihood of novel pathogens emerging — especially those that jump the species barrier from animals to humans. The disruption of the natural environment, the hunting and consumption of wildlife, the overuse of antibiotics, and various agricultural and food handling practices are all risk factors. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also our reckless enthusiasm for genetic modification — which introduces a whole range of new pathways by which novel pathogens might emerge.

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By Peter Franklin

Our interference is then compounded by everything we’re doing to speed up the spread of new infectious diseases. The key issue is globalisation. Hyper-connectivity and unprecedented mobility facilitate the exchange of ideas, culture, goods, services, tourists, workers and students… but also bugs.

It’s an obvious point, of course. We all know that a new disease that emerges on one side of the planet can spread to the other side within hours. That’s just the way it is, we figure — a downside of globalisation to be managed, and more than offset, by the much bigger upside. Except that this calculus assumes that the downside remains within reasonable bounds — that there is no danger of it ever becoming so extreme as to render the upside irrelevant.

*

In life, there are all sorts of risks worth taking. Taleb himself warns against naïve applications of the precautionary principle. We all run repeated dangers from going about our daily business — think traffic accidents. Does that mean we should never leave our homes? Indeed, given the statistics on domestic accidents, should we never get out of bed?

There are many reasons why we shouldn’t live our lives in such fear. Not least among them is that while domestic accidents may kill a small number of people, they’re not going to destroy society, let alone wipe-out the human species. There’s never going to be a uncontrollable plague of people falling off ladders and slipping on banana skins.

That’s why the so-called Bathtub Fallacy — the argument that because more people die from drowning in the bath than from X we shouldn’t worry about X — is so fatuous. If X is a risk with the potential for extreme escalation (like terrorism, for instance) then it is in a completely different class from bathtubs, ladders and banana skins.

There’s no better or more literal example of this kind of multiplicative risk than disease — in particular, new and fast-spreading disease that we haven’t had time to adapt to.

Further reading

The jaw-dropping scale of China’s global ambition

By Peter Franklin

We therefore need to ask very serious questions about a global economy and its propensity for creating the conditions in which new diseases frequently emerge and rapidly spread. In particular — and contra to the predictably woke and patronising takes on ‘not kicking-down’ — we need to talk about China. The People’s Republic is a society that is moving much faster than the West on many fronts (like transport infrastructure), but it is still behind on other things — like healthcare and food safety standards. That’s a potentially dangerous combination, one that prioritises growth and connectivity over precaution and sustainability. Furthermore, with the full complicity of the West, it is reordering the global economy.

I wonder if we will also become complicit in the counter-measures taken by the Chinese state, which have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for the monitoring and control of entire populations.

*

One final thought — and it’s to do with another piece of mathematics: the Drake Equation. This is used to calculate the number of space-faring civilisations in the galaxy given certain conditions (bear with me here). Even on some pretty conservative assumptions, the equation suggests that outer space ought to full of little green men. But if that’s the case, why have our telescopes and satellites found no sign of extraterrestrial intelligence? Why is there no credible evidence of aliens coming to visit us? We know that intelligent life is possible (we wouldn’t be discussing this question if it weren’t). We also know that the universe is easily big enough and old enough for it to have evolved not once but countless times. So where is everybody?

This is the Fermi Paradox — to which various solutions have been proposed. One is that there is some kind of ‘universal filter’ that stops intelligent life from evolving in the first place. The implication is that intelligence, or perhaps life itself, is so unlikely to arise through chance that it takes some kind of one-off miracle for it to happen.

Further reading

Is there anyone else out there?

By Peter Franklin

A more disturbing possibility is that the universal filter comes after the rise of intelligence. The reason why we have no evidence of alien civilisations is that something always happens to them before they get the chance to make it to the stars. Perhaps they nuke themselves back into the stone age. Well, some of them might, but all of them? What about the possibility of aliens who don’t invent nuclear weapons? Or who ban them? Or who aren’t aggressive?

A much more likely candidate for a universal filter is this: beyond a certain stage of globalisation, any civilised species becomes so susceptible to the appearance and spread of new diseases that sooner or later a pandemic wipes them out.

A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.

It is, of course, impossible to avoid risk completely. You could stay indoors and reduce your risk of death from lightning, transport accidents or being attacked by strangers. But that would only increase your long-term risk of chronic health problems and early death, thanks to physical inactivity and social isolation.

So let me rephrase that: why do we take the risks we do?

I suppose we could make our life decisions based on mathematics. And before doing anything we could calculate the odds of success. Or, assess by how much a favourite vice would increase the chances of getting a horrible disease.

But we don’t do the maths. Not because we’re stupid – but because we’re human, and we live in a messy human world, most of which can’t be reduced to numbers.

A great illustration of this is The Norm Chronicles, by Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter. It’s the story of Norm (or Average Man) but also of Prudence (who tries to avoid all risks) and an expanding family of characters called Kevin or Kelvin, who take every risk going. Spiegelhalter is a statistician, so the book does a fine job of using numbers to get some perspective on risk and danger. But The Norm Chronicles is much more than a maths book.

Suggested reading

Even experts are ignorant

By Sam Leith

It is also a highly entertaining read, as the characters’ varying attitudes to risk get them into comical or hair-raising scenarios. Whether through embracing risk, or excessive desperation to avoid it, Kelvin, Prudence and Norm allow us to laugh at exaggerated versions of ourselves, and then reflect on how we make decisions in the real world.

“Although we recognise the patterns in numbers as much as anyone,” the authors write, (modestly), “we can’t bring ourselves to say that any of our characters are irrational in choosing to ignore them and going their own way.”

After all, rational calculation, based on data from the past and present, only gets us so far with making decisions that commit us to one or other branch of our infinite possible futures. At some point you have to go with your feelings – and make a choice about which future self you want to become, while accepting that you don’t know, and can’t fully control, the consequences of your decision.

Which brings us neatly to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition – my second recommendation. Her subject is the inherent unpredictability of human action.

“This is not simply a question of inability to foretell all the logical consequences of a particular act, in which case an electronic computer would be able to foretell the future,” she writes, “but arises directly out of the story which, as the result of action, begins and establishes itself as soon as the fleeting moment of the deed is past.”

Suggested reading

How to understand the rise of national populism

By Matthew Goodwin

For Arendt, action begins a story in the human world, and so gains meaning when looked back at from the future. It’s not only the material consequences that can’t be certain before the event, but what the story, and hence the meaning, will ultimately be. And that’s inherently unpredictable because it’s a story involving other human beings, each of whom is also free to act.

Risk today is most often used in a negative sense; it is deemed to be something we should control, minimise or avoid altogether. Being ‘At-Risk’ is now an adjective, a condition that may infect you if you’re unlucky enough to live in the wrong postcode, have the wrong family, or fall into the wrong socio-economic bracket. Most of us are encouraged to see ourselves as At-Risk to some degree – of crime, or diabetes, or mental illness.

Deliberately putting oneself at risk, or taking risks, is seen as irresponsible, or immoral. Even in a financial context, where risk is acknowledged as an inevitable part of investment, regulation is designed to quarantine and contain it.

As Arendt reminds us, however, risk is intrinsic to action. Statistics can help us assess our options, but we can never know all the consequences before we decide what to do.

Many of the things that make us safer today than our ancestors started out as highly risky projects. Commercial flight is one of the safest ways to travel, mile for mile, but we owe it to the pioneers who threw themselves into thin air, in mechanisms whose performance was an unknown quantity. Nuclear power is seen as uniquely dangerous; but the move from coal has saved over a million lives, which would mainly have been lost to mining accidents or air pollution.

Suggested reading

We need to talk about death

By Ruth Davidson

Beyond these pragmatic reasons, though, we need to value risk-taking as fundamentally human. Look, by way of illustration, at what I’ve spent the past month doing. Why did I choose to bring a new show to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe? I’m no longer making my living as a professional comedian, so I’m not trying to be ‘discovered’ or to land a comedy agent. I could have spent August in the garden, reading and working on my next book, instead of accosting strangers with leaflets, and then offering myself for their judgement daily on a tiny stage in a dark basement.

I’m here because I feared that my life was getting too safe. I felt that I had fallen into the habit of only doing things that I know I can do, and foresaw my envelope of comfort shrinking to become a straitjacket. And I wanted to find out what I was capable of, onstage with a live audience and limited control over what will happen in each show.

Only through this willingness to start something new in ignorance of how the tale will end, can we discover, and reveal to others, who we are. Not what we are – an inventory of our qualities or social categories – but who– our character that emerges only in action. “Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure,” says Arendt.

Suggested reading

How to end Westminster's tribal warfare

By Polly Mackenzie

Which brings us to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Wind, Sand and Stars. My final recommendation for your summer reading is a collection of non-fiction writing about Saint-Exupéry’s life as a pilot in the early, and terribly risky, years of aviation. He writes with a deep humanism about the freedom of flight, but also about the connection he felt with other people. Some of them crossed his path only once in a distant land, or were nothing more to him than the sparks of their firelight, glimpsed far below his wings at night. But to him, each person was an irreplaceable subject, the centre of a unique universe that would vanish at the moment of their death.

Saint-Exupéry chose a life which made the risk of death tangible every day, in the companions who took off but did not land, and were not seen again. He himself describes crash landing in the desert, defying the odds by not dying on impact, only to realise that the most likely outcome was dying of thirst before rescuers could find him. “I have no regrets, I’ve gambled and I’ve lost,” he says at the point of resignation to death. “It was all in a day’s work. But at least I have breathed the wind of the sea.”

That story ends with rescue, of course, or we wouldn’t be reading it. Years later, though, Saint-Exupéry did take flight over the Mediterranean but never landed. His story found its ending, leaving us to draw meaning from his choice to live life to the full by embracing the risk of death.

It’s a reminder that the meaning of our lives is unlikely to be found in a vain attempt to eliminate uncertainty and risk.

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.

What helps us do these things is efficiency: the one thing of which we can never have too much. But what if our constant striving to streamline is actually having a negative effect?

That’s the argument advanced by Edward Tenner in his new book, The Efficiency Paradox. Efficiency is “something self-evidently desirable,” he says, “until it isn’t”.

His beef is with big data (in which large collections of information are analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends and associations), which is great at helping us to do more with less, or even to do less with much less. It’s not so good at helping us do something new and hitherto unimagined –those things that extend our capabilities.

Suggested reading

"Sneckdowns" and desire lines: A parable for the big data age

By Peter Franklin

Things like flight. It wasn’t big data that invented the aeroplane, but risk-taking humans who took a chance on heavier-than-air flight being possible, in many cases throwing themselves from high places in pursuit of their dream. Once you have aeroplanes, efficiency – through the use of big data – can do wonderful things, such as minimise unwanted environmental effects, reduce prices to put flight within reach of ordinary people, and let us choose the seat we want online.

This is what Tenner, quoting Clayton Christensen, Derek van Bever and Bryan Mezue, calls “efficiency innovation”, typical of the platform-based disrupters such as Uber and Amazon, that “makes existing goods and services available to more people at lower prices”. But “market-creating innovation” that generates the new products or services, such as photocopiers or aeroplanes, takes longer to bear fruit.

Take the labour market. Optimists about the future of jobs in an increasingly automated age point to previous waves of mechanisation, when new industries arose to employ redundant workers. Cars created new jobs for people who previously worked with horses, for example, and then aviation created an entirely new industry that today employs about 10 million people worldwide, directly and indirectly.

Suggested reading

All hail the AI dictatorship

By James Bloodworth

To some extent, I share that optimism; but for that pattern to persist in future, we need market-creating innovation to keep creating new industries. Those bigger gambles that won’t pay off for years, if ever, are less appealing to investors than the quick hits of market-disrupting efficiency innovation.

The most valuable companies in the US in 1917 made their money from steel, oil and the telegraph or telephone business. Today, the top five worldwide by market value are all in data, including Facebook and Google, whose business model rests on delivering advertising with ever-greater efficiency.

You could argue that those platforms are providing radically new products and services, albeit as a side product. Certainly, their existence has transformed the way we communicate with each other and find information. We learn more every week about how much data they collect about us – their users – and yet we continue to use the platforms we know are digitally surveilling and profiling us.

Suggested reading

Only lateral thinking can save us from economic stagnation

By Peter Franklin

This means that our experience of news and of our friends’ opinions, of videos created by users like us, or of political campaigns, is significantly mediated by algorithms that filter the endless tide of digital output. When those algorithms are gamed to feed us untruths, or horrific live videos of a suicide or murder, we ask why they can’t be made more efficient in preventing that kind of abuse.

The problem is, as Tenner puts it, that these “algorithms are written neither to advance a political outlook nor to establish the truth, but to maximise traffic and increase advertising revenue for the platform company”. The efficiency that the algorithms are designed to optimise is not for the benefit either of society or of the individual service user.

But “efficient at what, and for whose benefit?” is only the first question we should be asking. Tenner’s argument goes much deeper, challenging whether efficiency in itself is achievable or even desirable.

Suggested reading

Can Britain build an innovation economy?

By Vicky Pryce

Let’s go back to the “market-creating innovation” that produces new products and services. How can we make that innovation process itself more efficient? “The paradox of efficiency,” says Tenner, “is that progress towards greater efficiency is wasteful.” To make leaps of insight and creative imagination, human beings need to be inefficient. We need boredom, serendipity and “desirable difficulty”. We understand concepts better when we have to work harder to get them.

Experiments with reading on paper versus onscreen, with handwritten versus typed note-taking, and even with more and less legible typefaces, point to this “desirable difficulty” as a help in grasping underlying ideas. If you want to win a pub quiz, browse the internet on your smartphone. But to grasp big ideas, read a paper book in an archaic font, or listen to a lecture while making notes by hand.

Tenner has many other examples of how pursuing efficiency through technology and data can lead to its opposite. Using wearable tech to monitor physical activity and nudge us towards healthier lifestyles turns out, in experiments, to reduce activity, weight loss, and even happiness and well-being. Time and energy saved by home automation through the Internet of Things will probably be expended in the battle to secure networks against hackers.

Suggested reading

In the age of Big Data, politicians should not believe their eyes

By Peter Franklin

None of this means we should turn our backs on the algorithms – only that we should not rush to defer to their mechanical judgment. “Balancing algorithm and intuition to achieve inspired inefficiency,” as Tenner puts it, can free us from repetitive and time-consuming tasks to be creative and inventive. Combining contextual knowledge of a subject with the processing power of search engines or data analysis can deliver breakthroughs in discovery or invention.

The danger comes when we outsource our judgment, underestimating our human minds, shaped through the messy process of life in human society, and overestimating what algorithms can do. We may be fallible but, unlike computers, we understand what it means to live in this world, and we can imagine other worlds in which we might live in the future.

If we never go beyond doing the same things with increasing efficiency, we are missing opportunities that are no less important for being hard to quantify. Inefficiency is an unlikely rallying cry for the digital age, but it opens doors we might otherwise not even see.

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.

“Preventing the Earth from descending into a lifeless husk of a planet in a geological blink of an eye is technologically possible, experts say. But it will require confiscating unearned wealth from billionaires and ending the pointless wars we’ve been fighting for generations.”

This elicited a contemptuous response from many on the American Right. In the US, the environment is a much more polarised issue than it is in Europe – advocacy for and against action on climate change gets respectively bundled up with Left-wing and Right-wing positions on other issues.

However, it wasn’t just the reference to “confiscating unearned wealth” that got Holthaus’s critics riled up, but also the idea that our planet could become a “lifeless husk”.

A favourite talking point among ‘climate sceptics’ is the fact that even compared to the worst projected outcomes of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming, the planet has been hotter before – and yet managed to support a thriving biosphere. Talk of ‘saving the planet’ is, therefore, hyperbolic – the planet will be just fine, they say.

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On the face of it, they’re right. It helps to remember that we’re living through an atypically cold period in the Earth’s history. In fact, we’re still in an ice age – the Quaternary Glaciation – that started 2.58 million years ago. Luckily our own era is a relatively warm interglacial period, but it’s still chilly compared to how things were before the start of the current ice age.

In a fascinating article for Palladium, Patrick Mellor describes the good old days:

“The Antarctic Ice Sheet covered only a small area around the pole, the rest of the continent supporting mixed forests of conifers and southern beeches. The coastlines of the continents were many miles further inland than today.

“In contrast to the usual apocalyptic narratives, the tropics were not scorched wastelands. They were covered with luxuriant rainforests containing up to 100 species of ape, including our own ancestors. Temperatures were up to 10℃ higher than today at the poles, but the tropics were not much hotter.”

So, given the bigger picture, is man-made global warming anything to worry about? The answer to that is yes, because as a species we’ve evolved in accordance with Earth’s current conditions. We’re not fit to live in the much warmer climate of the distant past. The few millennia in which we’ve become a civilisation of billions have exhibited a narrow range of climatic conditions. We know that life in general can adapt to massive shifts in temperature, but there’s no evidence that we can.

Furthermore, while there are precedents (and then some) for the degree to which human activity is pushing up carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, there is no precedent for the speed of the change:

“…our emissions are occurring over a period of centuries, rather than tens of millennia. Even the most extreme natural events would release only on the order of 1 gigaton per year, whereas in 2017, global CO2 emissions were about 41 gigatons.

“…our own maximum total impact is well within the limits of the largest natural events that have occurred in prehistory, but is happening much faster, and is therefore significant. Judging by these prehistorical analogues, by default we can expect a very large impact: a mass extinction, significant loss of coastal land, and large changes to global weather patterns.”

If we end up doing our worst, then the consequences for biodiversity will be devastating (they’re pretty disastrous as it is). A large proportion of the planet’s species will not be able to adapt to the scale and rapidity of disruption and will therefore go extinct.

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Of course, life itself will survive – and, as with all mass extinctions, there will be a long, slow recovery in which surviving species evolve into new lifeforms to fill vacant ecological niches. But this will only happen over millions of years. On any timescale of human relevance, the planet we leave to our descendants will be a graveyard – a torn patchwork of wrecked ecosystems limping into posterity.

However, some value lies in comparisons to Earth’s deep past. Mellor argues that we should pay attention to eras, long before our own, in which very high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were reduced by natural processes. If we could somehow replicate them then perhaps we could geoengineer the climate to offset the impact of our greenhouse gas emissions.

These natural processes include unusually rampant plant growth, in which enough carbon dioxide is absorbed and retained to make a difference. Mellor believes that we could make this happen again through something called oceanic iron fertilisation – adding cheap micronutrients to the seas to encourage giant blooms of algae. It is estimated that each ton of iron additives could produce enough extra plankton growth to sequestrate 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

For reasons I’ve explained before, geoengineering in whatever form involves taking a huge risk with the only planet we’ve got. By far the safest way forward is to switch from filthy fossil fuels to clean energy and stop causing the problem in the first place. However, if we do need a plan B, then Patrick Mellor makes a good case for the least worst of the main geoengineering options.

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Geoengineering: another fine mess not to get into

By Peter Franklin

In fact, we could apply the underlying principle right now by planting more trees. Recent research shows that reforestation is a more powerful means of fighting climate change than previously thought. Before messing about with the oceans we should repair the damage we’ve done on land.

Humankind has entered a new era, one in which we are both capable and conscious of altering the natural world on a global scale. With boots that big and footprints that heavy, we must tread carefully.

Though we are capable of revolutionary change, our efforts are more wisely devoted to ceasing what we know to be bad and restoring what we know to be good.

Then, a few days later, came a scare about children aged 10 consuming the recommended daily sugar allowance for 18-year-olds, based on a Public Health England report. PHE’s chief nutritionist suggested that there “may be a case” for a tax on all sugary goods (there’s already one on soft drinks) if recent progress in reducing sugar loads stalls. And the health secretary, Matt Hancock, is planning to target social media adverts at smokers, drinkers and the obese in an attempt to improve their health.

Sometimes a nudge in the right direction helps. The collapse in smoking levels in recent years is a reminder of that. Smoking kills an awful lot of people, probably about half of all those who do it long-term; all but the most pure-bred libertarians would agree that government action to reduce it has been a positive thing.

Smoking, though, is a special case. There’s nothing else that a fraction of the population uses lots, most people use not at all, and which is unambiguously poisonous. In the years after Richard Doll et al showed that smoking caused lung cancer, epidemiologists were hopeful that there’d be lots of similar things: that they’d be able to show, say, that people who ate pomegranate all died of pleurisy, or drinking tea prevented gout, or something.

But it’s messier than that. Research into nutrition is really, really hard – you can’t reasonably do a randomised controlled trial on broccoli, and make 5,000 people go on a broccoli-free diet for 20 years and another 5,000 eat broccoli every day. If something were as bad for us as smoking, then you’d be able to see the effects with cruder, more observational research. But there isn’t, really. There’s a semi-jokey piece of dietary advice from the writer Michael Pollan from a few years ago: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Despite all the claims about superfoods and so on, and despite many decades of research into the impacts of food on our health, that remains about as precise as scientifically well-supported dietary advice can get.

But wait! Weren’t we just talking about how bacon causes cancer? Well: yes. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a subset of the World Health Organisation, issued a report in 2015 declaring that processed meats including bacon and sausages are carcinogenic. It was a careful assessment of years of prior research, and I’m sure it’s as good as it can be.

That said, there’s carcinogenic and carcinogenic. Smoking all your life raises your risk of lung cancer from about a one-in-1,000 chance of diagnosis in any given year to about a one-in-75 chance, according to this study; as best I can work out, your lifetime lung cancer risk goes up from about 0.2% to about 10%. (It’s kind of unclear because it all depends on how much you smoke and for how long.)

For comparison, if you eat two sausages or two rashers of bacon every day for your entire life, your risk of colorectal cancer goes up, roughly speaking, from about a one-in-1,500 chance per year to about a one-in-1,400, or about 5% in your lifetime to 6% in your lifetime.

To put it another way, if your anti-smoking measures stopped 10 people smoking, you’d probably prevent one case of lung cancer. But you’d have to stop 100 people eating bacon to prevent one case of colorectal cancer. That’s before you think of all the other health effects of smoking (various other cancers, vascular damage, heart disease), and the fact that lung cancer is more deadly than colorectal cancer is.

Sugar is more complicated: people who consume lots of sugar seem to be at greater risk of diabetes, over and above the risk caused by eating too many calories and becoming obese, which sugar, a very energy-intensive foodstuff, obviously contributes to.

But I can’t get a good sense of the scale of the risk; the meta-analysis I linked to earlier seemed to think that about 8,000 cases of type 2 diabetes in Britain per year could be attributed to sugary drinks, which sounds bad, but there are about 230,000 cases a year in total so it’s not a huge proportion. That is, however, only a small part of the overall problem; sugar also contributes to the obesity crisis, which is at the root of a much larger proportion of our health problems. A fifth of 10- to 11-year-olds are classified as obese, a direct result of poor, sugar-heavy diet.

So should we let government step in? My instinct is that a tax on processed meats for health reasons would be overkill – although there might be good environmental and animal-welfare reasons – while I’d be happy to take PHE’s lead on a sugar tax, because of the impact on obesity more than for its own sake.

The most important thing, though, is to express these risks realistically. The science of all this stuff is, as I have said, messy. In the case of processed meat, the cancer risk is relatively small. But the risks are constantly being compared with those of tobacco, which are literally of a different order of magnitude.

This stuff matters. Last week, another study was published about public perceptions of vaping. Vaping is hugely less damaging for you than smoking; it’s probably not harmless, but so far the evidence suggests that the risk is near-negligible compared to tobacco. But the study finds that nearly half of people think that vaping is about as dangerous as smoking.

That’s a direct result of scaremongering, by the media, but also by health campaigners and others who go around hyping every tiny study that finds that vape smoke has some irritant effect on lung cells in petri dishes or whatever, without putting in the context. It will cost lives, because people who might otherwise have switched from fags to e-cigs now will not, and a large number of those people will, therefore, die.

I’m not saying that scaremongering about bacon is as bad. But we do need to recognise that “bad for you” is not a binary condition, and not all carcinogens are born equal. If we rampage around insisting the government tax everything that might possibly give us cancer if we eat too much of it for 40 years, then the really important stuff – the message on smoking, obesity, drinking to excess – is going to get lost in the noise.

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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Ten years after the crash, we should still be terrified

By Peter Franklin

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.

As a demonstration of the power of machine learning, AlphaZero (and similar programs) caused some alarm – see, for instance, the Shadow Foreign Secretary’s take on the issue for UnHerd. If a machine mind can become a chess grandmaster between breakfast and lunch, then what might it achieve by dinner-time, or next week or, gulp, next year?

Well, here we are twelve months on, and human beings are still in charge of the planet. Whatever AlphaZero is up to these days, it isn’t ushering in the Singularity.

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In a short post for MIT Technology Review, Karen Hao explains why game-playing AI systems are limited in what they can achieve:

“[Reinforcement learning] is a category of machine learning techniques that uses rewards and penalties to achieve a desired goal. But the benchmark tasks used to measure how RL algorithms are performing—like Atari video games and simulation environments—don’t reflect the complexity of the natural world.

“As a result, the algorithms have grown more sophisticated without confronting real world problems—leaving them too fragile to operate beyond deterministic and narrowly defined environments.”

A game like chess has clear rules and defined objectives. Furthermore, the success, or otherwise, of any sequence of moves can be assessed in terms of interim and final game outcomes. This means an AI chess player can generate vast quantities of labelled data by playing games against itself – in which winning patterns of moves can be recognised and ‘learned’ in a process of trial and error.

Tasks in the real world, however, are not like a game. Even if an objective is clearly defined, the rules for achieving it may be neither obvious nor unchanging. Through trial and error, an AI system may be able to work out what the rules are (or at least a rudimentary version of the rules), but to recognise right and wrong answers (and hence the patterns of rightness and wrongness from which rules can be derived) it usually needs an external source of labelled data.

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For these reasons, and others, AI mastery of games does not imply competence, or potential competence, in anything else. So, no danger of AlphaZero and its ilk taking over anytime soon. A more immediate concern, however, is that in the process of computerising our economy and society, we are using technological tools to treat life as if it were a game.

The Latin word for “I play” is ludo. In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes what he calls the ludic fallacy – i.e. “the misuse of games to model real-life situations.” He sees the ludic fallacy at work in models of risk management, such as those that played such a disastrous role in the financial crash of 2008. By relying on game-like assumptions of the probability of certain things happening – i.e. those derived from pre-determined, non-extreme parameters – financiers were left clueless as to ‘black swan’ risks – i.e. the extremely rare, but highly consequential events that have such a defining impact on the real world.

In a different way, the ludic fallacy is also at work in the use of ‘gamification’ by businesses to influence the behaviour of employees, suppliers and customers. In an insightful Guardian long-read, Sarah Mason provides a succinct definition:

“Simply defined, gamification is the use of game elements – point-scoring, levels, competition with others, measurable evidence of accomplishment, ratings and rules of play – in non-game contexts. Games deliver an instantaneous, visceral experience of success and reward, and they are increasingly used in the workplace…”

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Drawing on her experience as a driver for a ride-hailing company, Mason describes how tech companies (especially those who coordinate the provision of a service through a digital ‘platform’) use gamification in place of traditional employee management:

“Every Sunday morning, I receive an algorithmically generated ‘challenge’ from Lyft that goes something like this: ‘Complete 34 rides between the hours of 5am on Monday and 5am on Sunday to receive a $63 bonus.’…

“Behavioural scientists and video game designers are well aware that tasks are likely to be completed faster and with greater enthusiasm if one can visualise them as part of a progression towards a larger, pre-established goal.”

Mason adds that “it is not uncommon to hear ride-hailing drivers compare even the mundane act of operating their vehicles to the immersive and addictive experience of playing a video game or a slot machine.”

That’s all the creepier given that the gamified instructions and incentives are generated algorithmically.

Of course, the relationships of the traditional workplace can also have an inhuman, unreal quality. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a more dehumanising piece of business jargon than ‘human resources’. But face-to-face contact, or any means of communication in which there’s a living, breathing person on both sides, at least allows for the possibility that common-sense, compassion and intuition might be applied the situation – especially if no one’s playing games.

Air-conditioning is what enabled this astonishing rate of growth, along with the wider shift in the US population toward the South and Southwest.

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Why air-conditioning is making us hotter

By Peter Franklin

But as Oliver Millman explains in the Guardian, there are limits to what air-con can achieve:

“Last summer, Phoenix was so hot that road signs and mailboxes melted. Planes couldn’t take off or land.”

Air-con provides a refuge, but as temperatures climb and summers lengthen, life in the Sun Belt can feel like a siege:

“It will get worse – Phoenix, the fastest-warming large city in the US, could spend close to half of its year in over 100F (37C) heat within 30 years.

“‘If you choose to live in the desert you have to learn how to live in the desert,’ [Amanda] Ormond [a local resident] said. ‘You worry about your car breaking down and so you have tons of food and water in it.

“‘But the heat used to break around September. Now, it’s October, sometimes November. We literally have six months of above 90F (32C). Mentally, you need a break. You can’t leave your house. It’s fatiguing.’”

Millman describes a new nationwide trend of “climate gentrification” – in which the well-to-do acquire property at higher elevations – either to escape the heat or, in vulnerable areas, the risk of flooding.

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Geoengineering: another fine mess not to get into

By Peter Franklin

In Arizona, that’s resulted in growing demand for homes (including holiday homes) in communities like Flagstaff (population: 70,000 souls, elevation: 7,000 feet):

“On a recent July day this year, when Phoenix hit 116F (47C), Flagstaff, a two-hour drive and a world away, was 80F (27C).”

But what about those who can’t afford to buy ‘elevation privilege’? They’ll either have to stay behind and sweat it out – or move out of the region altogether.

Climate change is already happening and we have no choice but to adapt to the warming that’s locked-in. However, there is a choice to be made between preventing further climate change and adapting to a hotter planet.

There are those who claim that the latter approach is more cost-effective. The argument is that prevention is an immediate and ongoing cost, but that adaptation can wait until climate change properly kicks in – by which time the global economy will be much bigger and the necessary spending that much more affordable. Those who suffer the worst impacts of climate change could be compensated from the proceeds of all that unrestricted growth.

Well, that’s the theory and it’s full of holes: the dubious economic assumptions; the impossibility of managing the ‘tail risks‘ of unmitigated climate change; the other costs of not kicking our addiction to fossil fuels. However, the biggest problem with the adaptation-only argument is a moral one. 

In Christian theology, the concept of ‘common grace’ refers to the blessings that God confers upon all of humanity, without condition. As it says in the Gospel of Matthew: “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

Whether within a religious framework or not, this is how we should see the blessing of a stable climate – as a form of common grace. It is there for the benefit of all – whether rich or poor, powerful or powerless.

To choose to take it away from anyone is not only an act of theft (for which ‘economic efficiency’ is never a defence), it also renders the poor and powerless dependent on the pity of the rich and powerful – making them beggars in their own homes.

Further reading

Decarbonising the economy: now for the hard bit

By Peter Franklin

The crash was the ultimate demonstration of market failure – and, many would argue, the failure of free market ideology.

A particular bugbear is the ‘efficient-market hypothesis‘, which is the theory that asset prices fully reflect all available information. The fact that ten years ago the value of entire companies and asset classes collapsed overnight is surely proof that the hypothesis is wrong.

Except that depends on what you mean by ‘value’. More than two millennia before the hypothesis was formulated, Publilius Syrus said “Anything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.”

In that respect, markets are never wrong. Indeed, modern markets have never been more right – because they gather information about more purchasers (and what they’re willing to pay) than ever before.

Further reading

How (some) economists finally caught up with financial reality

By Peter Franklin

One can object that this is missing the point – and that what purchasers are willing to pay for something can become totally detached from any rational assessment of its ‘deeper’ value (however one might want to define that).

Fair enough. But were the people responsible for the stability of the global financial system oblivious to this reality?

No, says Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post. The idea that “blind faith in markets” stopped the likes of Al Greenspan (chairman of the Fed before the crash) from seeing the warning signs is itself deeply flawed:

“Contrary to myth, Greenspan himself never believed that markets were efficient. In his youth, he wrote lucidly about bubbles and crashes and regarded market inefficiencies as so obvious that he sought to exploit them by day trading… As Fed chairman years later, Greenspan frequently reminded his colleagues that periods of prosperity could be punctured by ‘irrational exuberance’ in financial markets.”

Mallaby puts the blame not on market failure, but state failure.

The fact than an extensive system of financial regulation existed before the crash indicated that policy-makers were well aware of the potential of markets to go haywire. The real problem was that the regulatory framework was not fit for purpose:

“…the reality [was] that political constraints, not intellectual failures, prevented policymakers from curbing the housing mania. Nobody remembers that in 2001 the Greenspan Fed banned the most abusive subprime mortgages, for the good reason that the ban was circumvented. But why was it circumvented? The answer is that the capture of Congress by financial lobbies ensured the balkanization of regulation into an alphabet soup of agencies, many of them underfunded and ineffective.”

Though the financial lobbyists were representing private sector interests, they were pushing at an open door: both literally in having the run of legislatures and government departments; but also metaphorically given the state’s addiction to debt as facilitated by the money markets.

And it wasn’t just in America, of course. In the UK, Gordon Brown’s ‘tripartite’ system of financial regulation also produced an “alphabet soup of agencies”. As for continental Europe, one only has to look at how Greece ‘qualified’ for Eurozone membership to recognise the extent of state complicity in the causes of the ensuing financial calamities.

Further reading

The permanent punishment of the Greek people

By Peter Franklin

Mallaby makes a number of excellent points, but that doesn’t mean we should absolve the theoreticians of all responsibility.

The politicians were never blind to the potential for market failure. Where governments and financial institutions did go wrong, however, was their unfounded degree of confidence in their ability to manage the consequent risks. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb warned at the time, the risk models the regulators and bankers relied upon were deeply flawed – and for that we can certainly blame the theoreticians.

Ten years on from the crash what should worry us isn’t the risk of market failure. That, like death and taxes, we can assume. What should keep us up at night is that the debt that magnifies those risks hasn’t gone way – and nor has the false confidence of the risk managers.