Fascinating piece. It helped to crystalize for me an important intersection of some previously free-floating concepts and practical considerations.
However, I do feel compelled to challenge the statement "we had previous knowledge of pandemics and we knew that this would end some point in the next year or two." It mischaracterizes both the contemporary medical-scientific body of knowledge and the general public sentiment (scientifically informed or otherwise). Covid revisionism is commonplace; the phenomenon pervades discussions of this episode and certainly isn't unique to viral pandemics. In drawing attention to it here, I'm advocating heightened self-awareness in support of more responsible deployments of history.
If you look back at the record of the opening days and weeks of the outbreak, there were very few virologists, epidemiologists, vaccinologists, etc. willing to offer any such assurance that the threat to public health posed by SARS-COV-2 would be resolved within two years. Why? Because our experience with past pandemics, in fact, weighed against the many fortuitous assumptions required to predict a reassuringly brief onslaught, such as: that virulence wouldn't increase with broader transmission; that effective treatments and therapies would be devised; that a vaccine might be developed in months, rather than the typical years; that politicians would endorse a playbook of potentially draconian non-medical interventions and that these would be met with widespread compliance.
So, to the extent that realistic assessments and prudent advice from experts then still held sway, most people were sensibly bracing themselves for what might have been a much longer haul against a much graver threat. Our prospects, realistically rendered and appertained, were uncertain, at best.
Your statement implicitly indulges in hindsight-bias. It revises both the available facts and prevailing sentiments that obtained at outset of the Covid pandemic. To downplay those perceptions/assessments of the threat, criticize then-prudent decisions or valorize either ignorance of, or disregard for, informed assessments/guidance amounts to an endorsement of an attenuated response to some future contagion. Further, it subtly contributes to the maladaptive erosion of respect for expertise and authority in our political and intellectual culture.
The problem is that, like all dodged bullets, Covid actively invites us to draw the fallacious conclusions that teach the wrong lessons. It turned out to be, entirely by chance, an exceptionally mild-mannered and forgiving virus. COV-2 stands in benign contrast to pathogens such as its SARS predecessor, Spanish Flu, Ebola and MERS (not to mention the likes of Polio, Measles, Rubella, etc.). In those opening days, experts and authorities had every reason to take seriously the possibility of a 10% case fatality rate. That was the experience of SARS and MERS, the two most recent and biologically adjacent analogs. Ahead of epidemiological data--which, of course, becomes available only in the aftermath of widespread transmission--we didn't know that Covid wouldn't preferentially claim the lives of healthy young adults (as did Spanish Flu) or even children, killing 1%, 5% or perhaps more of the infected. The fact that Covid, instead, tended to "harvest" (to use the grimly actuarial term used by health economists) a high proportion of the elderly and premorbid in our population (and relatively few of them, at that) during a pandemic foreshortened by unprecedented innovations in vaccine development has made the entire episode surprisingly easy to accommodate ourselves to. It's very tempting to look back on those early dire warnings as alarmist and the public health interventions they motivated as unnecessarily burdensome. Because, if the experts are that clueless and authorities so obviously prone to overreach, next time we mustn't be so naive about things. Including our portfolios.
I don't mean to say that you haven't offered a useful framework for understanding the financial dimensions of time (and vice versa). But we need to be careful when we mine the past--our own, others' or shared--for lessons. Like memory, history domesticates events into tidy trains of causes and effects that satisfy our appetite for agency and control. The central problem for investors isn't to devise strategies that properly discount a reliable view of a singular future. Our challenge is to act in the face of competing renditions of the future that are, normally, diverse and somewhat mutually exclusive. Occasionally, the possibilities and prescriptions on offer are wildly divergent and diametrically opposed.
For the most part, our risk assessments and responses are largely our own remit. There are, however, a few notable exceptions. Leadership/stewardship is one. Personal behaviour with public health consequences is another. A third is published advocacy, advice or persuasion. In those cases, it's important for agents to appreciate the broadened scope of non-personal risks they are engaging, however deliberately or obliquely.
I wouldn't bother if I didn't respect the calibre of your work. Keep it up--it's a much appreciated contribution to the space.
Nice write up. No idea why I took me 3 years to find it lol
Timeless content ;)
Planning to make a video about TIME in investing soon.
great post!
Thanks F.K! Your content is top notch 👌
Fascinating piece. It helped to crystalize for me an important intersection of some previously free-floating concepts and practical considerations.
However, I do feel compelled to challenge the statement "we had previous knowledge of pandemics and we knew that this would end some point in the next year or two." It mischaracterizes both the contemporary medical-scientific body of knowledge and the general public sentiment (scientifically informed or otherwise). Covid revisionism is commonplace; the phenomenon pervades discussions of this episode and certainly isn't unique to viral pandemics. In drawing attention to it here, I'm advocating heightened self-awareness in support of more responsible deployments of history.
If you look back at the record of the opening days and weeks of the outbreak, there were very few virologists, epidemiologists, vaccinologists, etc. willing to offer any such assurance that the threat to public health posed by SARS-COV-2 would be resolved within two years. Why? Because our experience with past pandemics, in fact, weighed against the many fortuitous assumptions required to predict a reassuringly brief onslaught, such as: that virulence wouldn't increase with broader transmission; that effective treatments and therapies would be devised; that a vaccine might be developed in months, rather than the typical years; that politicians would endorse a playbook of potentially draconian non-medical interventions and that these would be met with widespread compliance.
So, to the extent that realistic assessments and prudent advice from experts then still held sway, most people were sensibly bracing themselves for what might have been a much longer haul against a much graver threat. Our prospects, realistically rendered and appertained, were uncertain, at best.
Your statement implicitly indulges in hindsight-bias. It revises both the available facts and prevailing sentiments that obtained at outset of the Covid pandemic. To downplay those perceptions/assessments of the threat, criticize then-prudent decisions or valorize either ignorance of, or disregard for, informed assessments/guidance amounts to an endorsement of an attenuated response to some future contagion. Further, it subtly contributes to the maladaptive erosion of respect for expertise and authority in our political and intellectual culture.
The problem is that, like all dodged bullets, Covid actively invites us to draw the fallacious conclusions that teach the wrong lessons. It turned out to be, entirely by chance, an exceptionally mild-mannered and forgiving virus. COV-2 stands in benign contrast to pathogens such as its SARS predecessor, Spanish Flu, Ebola and MERS (not to mention the likes of Polio, Measles, Rubella, etc.). In those opening days, experts and authorities had every reason to take seriously the possibility of a 10% case fatality rate. That was the experience of SARS and MERS, the two most recent and biologically adjacent analogs. Ahead of epidemiological data--which, of course, becomes available only in the aftermath of widespread transmission--we didn't know that Covid wouldn't preferentially claim the lives of healthy young adults (as did Spanish Flu) or even children, killing 1%, 5% or perhaps more of the infected. The fact that Covid, instead, tended to "harvest" (to use the grimly actuarial term used by health economists) a high proportion of the elderly and premorbid in our population (and relatively few of them, at that) during a pandemic foreshortened by unprecedented innovations in vaccine development has made the entire episode surprisingly easy to accommodate ourselves to. It's very tempting to look back on those early dire warnings as alarmist and the public health interventions they motivated as unnecessarily burdensome. Because, if the experts are that clueless and authorities so obviously prone to overreach, next time we mustn't be so naive about things. Including our portfolios.
I don't mean to say that you haven't offered a useful framework for understanding the financial dimensions of time (and vice versa). But we need to be careful when we mine the past--our own, others' or shared--for lessons. Like memory, history domesticates events into tidy trains of causes and effects that satisfy our appetite for agency and control. The central problem for investors isn't to devise strategies that properly discount a reliable view of a singular future. Our challenge is to act in the face of competing renditions of the future that are, normally, diverse and somewhat mutually exclusive. Occasionally, the possibilities and prescriptions on offer are wildly divergent and diametrically opposed.
For the most part, our risk assessments and responses are largely our own remit. There are, however, a few notable exceptions. Leadership/stewardship is one. Personal behaviour with public health consequences is another. A third is published advocacy, advice or persuasion. In those cases, it's important for agents to appreciate the broadened scope of non-personal risks they are engaging, however deliberately or obliquely.
I wouldn't bother if I didn't respect the calibre of your work. Keep it up--it's a much appreciated contribution to the space.
Still trying to make time to reply to this...