How Each Crisis that Engulfed 2020 was Predictable and Foreseen
In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb published his seminal piece, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, to great commercial success and critical acclaim. The book, among other things, told the story of a popular assumption that remained nestled in the minds of ‘Old World’ citizens until the late 17th century: that all swans were white. As explorers from Europe came ashore the new, ‘exotic’ continent of Australia, they noticed something improbable at the time: a black swan. After thousands of years of observation, the people of the Old World had their indisputable fact shaken at its core — it was false. Taleb takes this example and engineers it into a full-fledged concept: Black Swan events lie outside the realm of regular expectations, carry an extreme impact, and though unpredictable, compel people to create explanations for the occurrence of the event (making it predictable in retrospect). Taleb provides several examples, including the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, and the terrorist attacks that took place on September 11, 2001. Taleb says that, by definition, a Black Swan event is unpredictable, and any ‘Monday Morning Quarterbacking’ post-hoc is an attempt at retrospective explanation. This article is not meant to directly deconstruct whether Taleb’s main premise is true — there may truly be events that nobody could have ever foreseen — but is designed to repudiate the notion that any of the major events that took place in 2020 can be classified as a Black Swan event. It is only indirectly, by setting out to prove that these events could have been foreseen and are not an exercise in retrospective explanation, does this article pierce at Taleb’s premise and parry its escape mechanisms. It marries the general foreseeability of the events (White Swans) with their specific unique qualities (Black Swans), to create the concept of the Grey Swan.
A Convergence of Crises
Wildfires
As 2020 began, a new crisis emerged in the world: wildfires had engulfed a sizable portion of Australia. By March, 18.6 million hectares of land were burned, three billion terrestrial vertebrates were killed and nearly $103 billion in property damage was recorded. In the aftermath, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Liberal Party eschewed taking responsibility for the fires by directing attention away from climate change — an issue his party underplayed and failed to focus on during his time in office. By September, at the opposite side of the world, wildfires set ablaze the State of California, destroying vegetation, wildlife, and infrastructure. The air quality in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose were at hazardous levels. The California coastline was dipped in a red haze, mimicking Mars’ rouge vistas.
COVID – 19
By the middle of March 2020, a new global crisis dawned on the world: COVID-19 (coronavirus). The coronavirus was a contagious respiratory and vascular disease that was first identified in Wuhan, China in late 2019. Three months later, the virus spread across every habitable continent in the world, infecting millions and causing a tectonic shift in how life was organized in every community in the world. Politicians yet again, ranging from Premier Xi Jinping to President Donald Trump, deferred responsibility for the outbreak and rapid spread of the virus. It was, according to the New York Times in September of 2020, “unpredictable”.
Civil Unrest
As summer approached, a new crisis brought Western society to a standstill: civil unrest and mass protests spawned by the police murder of George Floyd. Floyd, a father five, fiancé, and former musician, was a Black man questionably detained by Minneapolis Police and mercilessly killed in front of an onlooking crowd in May of 2020. The killing sparked a blaze of grief, anger, and frustration that poured onto the streets of every major metropolis in the Western world. From Minneapolis, to Los Angeles, to New York City, Toronto, London, and Paris, protestors called for systematic reforms to policing, the prison system, and other institutions with deeply entrenched structures of racism. Most of the protests remained peaceful, disruptive and effective. A small fraction boiled into riots, looting, and anarchist upheaval, propelled primarily by white agitators from outside the affected communities. A slew of other killings of innocent Black men and women, including Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake, kept the blaze of protest roaring far into the summer. Political leaders and media outlets such as Politico (July 2020) described the nearly global movement as “unpredictable”.
Presidential Elections
Finally, as the autumn leaves began to fall and the weather cooled, a new crisis washed over the democratic world: the 2020 American Presidential Elections. The most powerful country in the world, a bastion of liberal democracy for the past quarter millennium, was holding its most contentious election since the American Civil War in the 1860s. The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the nomination and confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett heightened the tensions. Trump’s poor handling of COVID-19, mixed with his incompetent leadership on race relations and a plummeting economy, made Democratic nominee Joe Biden the unquestionable favourite. Polls from the Economist, Reuters, Quinnipiac, and NBC News, among others, had Biden up nationally on average of 8%. The polls also predicted the Senate would flip to the Democrats, that there would be a gain for Democrats in the House, and a ‘Blue Wave’ would give Joe Biden almost all of the swing states. As of writing this article, the Senate has remained in the hands of the GOP, the Democrats lost seats in the House, and Trump has garnered victories in four swing states (Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Ohio), losing only within 1-2% points in Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona. In the aftermath of a clear Biden victory, Donald Trump disputed the integrity of the election, threatened to bring the matter to the SCOTUS, and called on protesters to march to polling stations to intimidate poll workers. This was described, by the Washington Post, as an “unpredictable development”.
Was any of this predictable? Yes. Nearly all of it.
Grey Swans Dressed in Black Clothing
For each crisis listed — and there are many more in 2020 that did not make the list given the spatial limitations of the article (the Wet’suwet’en Protest Movement, Terrorist Attacks in Europe, and Monsoons in South Asia) — there were indicators beforehand pointing to either its occurrence or its severity.
The climate in Australia, California and all around the world has been worsening in both frequency and extremity since record keeping began. Climate scientists have repeatedly collected the data and charted the trend lines demonstrating increases in air temperature, droughts, lightning strikes. and decreases in air moisture content and precipitation for the past century in both Australia and California. The climate models had predicted, in conservative estimates, a 30% increase in the risk of catastrophic climate events in Australia, and a 25% increase in California. Last year — 2019 — was one of the hottest and driest years ever recorded in both locations (since record keeping began). Suffice it to say, the severity of the wildfires in either California or Australia were not unpredictable. The models had been anticipating the extreme weather events for decades, detailing trends and making forecasts. These events were Grey Swans.
COVID-19’s origins remain a matter of great debate and controversy. Often these discussions are contaminated by political motivations, either to paint a competing foreign state as wholly responsible for a global tragedy, or to reduce blame to one unpopular politician. Generally, it is accepted that the virus was transmitted from animals to humans in a food market in or around Wuhan, China. The circumstances that provided the fertile environment for this transmission to occur, and for it to spread as rapidly as it did, are what scientists and global health experts have focused on since the initial outbreak. The findings from these inquiries provide support for the broader conclusion that COVID-19 was not unpredictable. So, what are those findings? First, researchers have pointed to the global wildlife trade as one incubator for the transmission of a zoonotic virus to humans. Exotic animals are trafficked across parts of South, East, and Southeast Asia through wet markets: open areas where produce, from meat to vegetables, are sold. Many of these markets are poorly maintained, with little regard for sanitation procedures or preservation practices providing the perfect settings for cross-species transmissions of diseases afflicting the animals. These transmissions sometimes have the right characteristics to transfer to human beings. Zoologists, environmentalists, and health experts have long urged public policy officials to shut down these markets and enforce existing laws prohibiting the trade of exotic animals. All of this was in the zone of predictability. Second, researchers have pointed to the growing encroachment on animal habitats through industry, urbanization, increased agriculture as another semiconductor for zoonosis. Over the past century, land use has accelerated significantly, narrowing the distance between wildlife and human settlements, creating more opportunities for pathogens to transmit from animals to humans. The reduction of biodiversity has also increased the likelihood of carriers of corona viruses to interact with human beings. This was one of the explanations provided for the emergence of Ebola from bats to human beings in 2014. Both of these aforementioned considerations predated the emergence of COVID-19 and were flagged as warnings to political and industry leaders as hazards which may provide the right conditions for a global pandemic. In these ways, COVID-19 was not beyond the horizon of prediction. There were known conditions creating studied effects that themselves were predicted to cause a disease capable of spreading across the world. They were Grey Swans.
The Black Lives Matter movement was created in 2013, in response to the shooting of a young Black teen (Trayvon Martin) in Florida in 2012. The shooter was part of a ‘neighbourhood watch’ and, from all accounts, initiated the encounter with Trayvon Martin and killed him in response to pushback. George Zimmerman, the shooter, was acquitted. This sparked protests across many of America’s Black neighbourhoods, calling for justice. This shooting was followed by several other incidents that generated massive protests, including the police killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, and O’Shae Terry. Often these protests were confined to the city in which the killings occurred or neighbouring Black communities. 2020 brought forth something different. Protests spread across every state in America, in every community, whether Black or white, rich or poor, inner city or suburban. America had reached a boiling point. The divide between the rich and poor communities in major metropolises has never been wider, creating a cross section of economic and racial frustration in Black communities. The resurgence of white supremacist violence in America — evidenced by the Charleston massacre at a Black Methodist church in 2015, the murder of a peaceful protestor at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, and the murder of Latino shoppers at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 — has intensified the national consciousness regarding institutional racism and white supremacy. The increased hostility between the left and right has made counter protesting — catalyzed by classifying Black Lives Matter as a ‘left wing ideology’ — more appealing to far-right groups. In addition to all of this, there is the increasing adoption of real-time communication devices, citizen journalism, and crowd fundraising. This panoply of factors is not new nor is it unprecedented. They have all been slowly emerging, touching at the corners, ready to burst at the seams. They were predictive indicators. They were Grey Swans.
Donald Trump’s sustained appeal with the American electorate was not unforeseeable. In 2016, a year which hit many of us like a speeding train with no sound, the writing was on the wall for a Trump victory. Although Trump did end up losing the 2020 election, his continued popularity was not difficult to predict. Trump is one of the most unpopular presidents in American history, and yet, he was able to allow the GOP to hold onto the Senate, gain in the House, and win a couple of swing states. The mainstream media, the private sector, the political establishment, and allies of the United States all backed Joe Biden (as they should have). Despite all of the money flowing through the Biden campaign, all of the celebrity and corporate endorsements, and Trump’s own party splintering in two, the results reflected one unsettling truth: nearly 69 million people voted for Donald Trump. This was predictable. The polarization between the American Right and Left is more extreme than ever. Much of Trump’s support is a product of a deep investment his supporters have in Trump’s ‘war against the left’. Anxiety and fear of the other side drives support for Trump. So where does this anxiety stem from? Many Americans remain frustrated by the Democratic Party because of what they perceive as an over emphasis on cultural issues and under emphasis on the concerns of the rural and working class. Andrew Yang, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2019, said it succinctly when he noted “the Democratic Party has taken on a role as the coastal, urban elites who are more concerned about policing various cultural issues than improving the working class’ quality of life [which has been declining for years]”. Many of Trump’s supporters do not see the Democratic Party concerned with their lives, their issues, and their struggles. This disconnect drives anxiety among the Trump base, In addition to this, the Democratic Party’s flirtation with hard left policies, such as defunding the police, the complete abandonment of non-renewable means of energy production, wealth taxes, and advocating for BDS all remain deeply unpopular with a wide swath of the American electorate (especially independents). This drives fears from center-right voters that the Democrats will shift farther left to a point of no return. The Democratic nomination race should have been a telltale sign that, as long the Democratic Party fails to communicate the benefits the working class stands to gain from Democrats being in power, Trump-like figures on the right will remain an appealing option despite their bigotry, incompetence, and totalitarian tendencies. The writings on the wall are predictive indicators. They are Grey Swans.
Going Forward
The narrative that 2020 was unforeseen and unpredictable needs to be re-examined and challenged at every stop. To explain away incidents as one off or an anomalous phenomenon that never came across our horizon would be to allow people in power to shirk responsibility for the consequences of Grey Swans. It would mean exonerating politicians, corporate leaders, and international organizations who neglected information that demanded further interrogation. It would, most importantly, flatten the urgency required to prepare for the next crisis: whether that be environmental, epidemiological, social, or political. If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that we should always keep a lookout for Grey Swans.