The Better Letter: Inherent Uncertainty
Most of the time we operate with an illusion of certainty
Like all of us, despite and because of our present circumstances, Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland wants nothing more than a better tomorrow and puts a lovely, stripped-down, melancholy spin on the famous Annie showstopper.
We’re all searching for better tomorrows in a crisis-torn world that is already profoundly different and inherently uncertain. That uncertainty is this week’s primary focus.
Today, I’m experimenting by issuing TBL on Friday. If you have a preferred publication day or anything else to offer, please let me know via email to rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright). I invite comments, tips, questions, and criticisms.
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Inherently Uncertain
Regular readers may recall that my darling bride and I are walking for at least an hour a day during Lent. That commitment turned out to be much easier to uphold than I had expected. On one of those recent walks, we happened by a local house of worship, the site of the Poway synagogue shooting almost a year ago, about half-a-mile from our house.
We stopped to look at the small memorial there, a grim reminder, as if COVID-19 weren’t enough of one, that rain falls on the just and unjust, as Jesus said. Dreadful outcomes needn’t be earned. We can do the right thing and make the right play and things still turn out wrong.
“Life is on the wire. The rest is just waiting.”
None of us has managed a pandemic before.* We’re not wired for “social distancing” or “sheltering in place.” We aren’t equipped to be physically separated from the people we share our lives with. We’re living with anxiety and uncertainty while unconnected every single day. As Hamlet says to his father’s ghost, “Time is out of joint.”
More broadly, there are myriad basic things about COVID-19 we don’t know yet – for example, the number infected with coronavirus in Spain is estimated to be somewhere between 1.8 million and 19 million – which means there are even more things about the economy and the markets we can’t even begin to analyze (note the dispersion in the above chart, for example). Record market volatility indicates uncertainty in the extreme as price discovery breaks down.
“Nobody knows anything,” as William Goldman famously said. He may not be righter now than before, but he seems righter.
And that’s my point.
We typically think and live as if we are in control of our lives. That’s less true than we care to concede, as current circumstances demonstrate. That’s why people in my business are required to emphasize that past performance is not indicative of future results. Fate isn’t sealed. Past isn’t prologue.
We are self-serving creatures to the core, and self-serving bias is our ongoing tendency to attribute our successes to skill and our failures to very bad luck. But the stark reality is that luck (and, if you have a spiritual bent, grace) plays an enormous role in our lives – both good and bad – just as luck plays an enormous role in many specific endeavors, from poker to investing to winning a Nobel Prize. If we’re honest, we’ll recognize that many of the best things in our lives required absolutely nothing of us and what we count as our greatest achievements usually required great effort, tremendous skill, and even more luck.
Talent is universal but opportunity is not. Bill Gates would not have become the Bill Gates we know had he been born into poverty in Pakistan. As Nick Heil explains, “you never really know how lucky you are until your luck runs out.”
Our industry and skill often matter, of course, and often a great deal. Because our lives are much more random and contingent than we recognize, luck is often intertwined with them.
Sometimes our luck is good, as when the San Antonio Spurs opened a game by making 14 straight three-point shots. Sometimes our luck is bad, as when the Houston Rockets missed 27 straight three-pointers with a trip to the NBA Finals on the line. Sometimes it’s both at the same time.
There are varying degrees of fault and stupidity throughout the COVID-19 transmission chain. Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz mocked COVID-19 precautions…
…and then came down with the virus and infected at least one teammate. Ultimately, COVID-19’s appearance and any singular infection are essentially random consequences, what Christian theologians call “natural evil,” a “simple twist of fate.”
Nobody created or weaponized the coronavirus. It just happened.
Our lives are incessantly messy. We condense and simplify these messy lives into narratives, which flatten us while making our lives seem less contingent and more coherent than they really are.
Whatever our preferred narratives, real life is routinely non-linear and random, often wildly so. Surprising things happen all the time – unexpected, off-brand, and off-message. The world is so big and so complex that there are enough once-in-a-century, huge, bad events that they seem to happen at least once a decade.
Many of these big events are entirely or, at least, essentially out of our control. That’s a problem all the data in the world won’t fix. The global coronavirus pandemic is one such huge, once-in-a-century type, essentially random event. It has not so much altered our lives as stopped them in their tracks – at an utterly random point.
As we’re learning – more each day – randomness can have a dark edge, even when we are spared.
As one combat veteran explained, “You realize there’s no rhyme or reason to why some guy gets hurt and another doesn’t, some guy lives and another doesn’t . . . There are enough gunfights and enough things blowing up and people are going to get hurt. That’s just how it goes.”
Those of us who have been involved in the markets for a long time (or at least a couple weeks) will recognize that, as Keynes is purported to have said, the markets can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent. Tom Stoppard, in his play, The Hard Problem, explains why: “In theory, the market is a stream of rational acts by self-interested people; so risk ought to be computable. But every now and then, the market’s behavior becomes irrational, as though it’s gone mad, or fallen in love. It doesn’t compute. It’s only computers compute.”
It doesn’t compute, of course, because markets are made, controlled, and driven by people, who may be self-interested, but who aren’t always or necessarily rationally self-interested. We are merely people, not meat machines. We are yearning, hurting, and infuriating — driven by “the attraction Newton left out” and by the devout hope that the better angels of our nature that Lincoln saw are real.
All in all, we’re both more predictable and less logical than we’d like to think. We want binary questions and answers in a world far messier and more complicated than that. In the Christian tradition, when God shows up, it’s not anticipated; it’s unexpected, it’s in surprising ways, and it’s messy.
When something unexpected happens and markets go down – as happens from time to time – commentators often remark that “uncertainty” caused the price action. The problem is, such uncertainty never leaves. We only have, sometimes, the illusion of certainty.
During a crisis, it’s much easier than usual to recognize that our lives are inherently uncertain. Because it is, we should try to prepare for that uncertainty as best we can. Redundancies (like an emergency fund or a diversified supply chain) and resilience matter more than efficiency in crisis.
Inherent uncertainty also means we should take greater care to consider who and what we can depend on. Lots of us are discovering or rediscovering that our lives, our livelihoods, our wealth, our comforts, and our relationships are more fragile and contingent than we thought. If each of us were more aware of the importance of luck (or grace) to our successes, we’d be humbler and kinder. There is already some evidence on this point. As the Scripture says, “Anxiety weighs down the heart, but a kind word cheers it up.”
We’d also serve more – as so many are doing today – because misfortune can be indiscriminate. During the plague in the 14th Century, “Everyone ran in panic from the sick. Neighbors shunned neighbors, relatives relatives. Children abandoned elderly parents and priests their flocks. Incredibly, ‘even fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.’” Today, like first-responders on 9.11, medical personnel are running into danger. We should honor their service.
The gift economy is particularly active today too, as it should be. People in the arts have been especially creative in this regard.
To pick another example among many, lots of people, organizations, and businesses are providing meals for healthcare workers. We should support and honor those efforts. Service is always powerful. In a crisis, it is essential.
For the first time, someone I knew personally died from coronavirus yesterday. He won’t be the last. There but for the grace of God go I.
The best means for dealing with inherent uncertainty are simple: humility, kindness, and service. It’s simple but very hard to execute. You may need some luck (or grace) to do it.
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* Protests to the contrary notwithstanding, there is plenty of evidence that relevant experts have long known about the risks of a pandemic and tried to warn us without success.
Totally Worth It
Here are some recent stories I found interesting, noteworthy, important, fun, or just plain weird.
Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device. A New Jersey woman was charged with violating the state's stay at home order after she went outside to throw a Molotov cocktail at her boyfriend's house. Top chefs share their go-to comfort foods. Alcohol sales have skyrocketed. Guns, too.
Mixed Media: Joe Diffie became a COVID-19 victim last week; his duet with Mary Chapin Carpenter is lovely and makes for a fitting memorial. If you’re having trouble sleeping, the Arkansas Symphony is offering a soothing series, “Bedtime with Bach,” every evening. John Krasinski started a new YouTube series focused on sharing good news. Mother and daughter working together to make PPE (video). The Getty Museum is asking people to recreate artwork using random house objects. Empire State Building announces new nightly light show to raise New Yorkers’ spirits. The USNS Comfort arrives in NYC. When TV anchors work from home, a lot can go wrong. J.K. Rowling has launched an online Harry Potter portal with quizzes, games, and puzzles. Rowling said: “The teachers, parents, and carers working to keep children’s lives as normal and happy as possible while we’re all on lockdown deserve a bit of magic.”
Duly Noted
Because we are all stuck at home either all the time or, at least, much more than we’re used to, there is tremendous pressure on Facebook to manage the intensified use of its platform. Notice, however, the following detail in a story from The New York Times outlining that pressure.
“The strain has been compounded by Facebook’s workforce adapting to working from home, which had been discouraged in the past. The company’s executives have long preached internally that face-to-face meetings and in-person collaboration were central to Facebook’s success. The importance of in-person conversation was so great that employees at offices from Singapore to New York were frequently asked to travel to the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, for quarterly meetings.”
Those non-stop advocates for digital connection don’t really believe in it.
Benediction
Dietrich Bonhoeffer voluntarily returned home to Germany from the safety of an American academic post to oppose the Third Reich. He became a spy and activist who was imprisoned for plotting to assassinate Adolph Hitler. He was also among the greatest Christian theologians of the 20th Century. For Christmas 1944, shortly before his execution, Bonhoeffer wrote his last theological text – a beautiful poem, “By loving forces silently surrounded (Von guten Mächten treu und still umgeben),” – from his cell. It was put to music by Siegfried Fietz, who sings it on the video linked below. An English translation appears on the screen. You may read it here.
Here’s the final stanza:
By loving forces wonderfully sheltered,
we are awaiting fearlessly what comes.
God is with us at dusk and in the morning
and most assuredly on ev'ry day
Both in Bonhoeffer’s context and ours, it makes for a remarkable benediction.
Issue 7 (April 3, 2020)