“I just think this is something,” President Trump said of the coronavirus early in March, “that you can never really think is going to happen.”
I wish he wouldn’t say such things, as it suggests a lack of imagination.
Trump would hardly be the first in government to find it hard to think up grim scenarios for which there is little precedent (although just having marked, two years ago, the centennial of the Spanish flu, one would think there was precedent aplenty). As the 9/11 Commission said of experts who failed to anticipate the use of commercial airliners as weapons, “Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies.”
I think what Trump means is not that a pandemic was somehow beyond conceiving, but that, given how unlikely a plague is to show up on any given day, odds are it won’t happen on any given day. There’s a way in which that’s perfectly reasonable. Playing according to the odds is the card counter’s edge; placing a bet with near-impossible odds — say, buying a lottery ticket — is the stuff for suckers.
But though it may be reasonable to expect the near-certain outcome, it isn’t always rational to bet everything on even the likeliest of likelihoods — not if the diminishingly small alternative comes with catastrophic consequences.
A friend of mine likes to tell the story of traveling with a college buddy — let’s call him Rick — while the two of them were students at Oxford. On a daytrip to medieval Warwick Castle, they climbed centuries-old stairs to the top of a high tower. Leaning on the crenelated parapet, both had the realization they were standing out on an ancient, jutting overhang held up by a weathered stone corbel. Rick instantly leaped back, which led my friend to laugh at him: “This has been here six- or seven-hundred years. What makes you think it’s going to give way now?”
“Nonzero probability,” was his reply.
Before you think he’s a nut, it’s worth knowing that Rick would go on to get a Ph.D. in quantum physics at Cal Tech. He also had imagination enough to be able to entertain what it would be like if the unlikely took its turn at the same time he happened to be taking his.
Sometimes, we spend extravagant amounts of money to guard against the extremely unlikely when the extremely unlikely isn’t just bad, but really, really, really bad. Perhaps the best example of this in pathogen terms is from the early ‘60s, when the U.S. space program had its sights on the moon. A yet-to-be-famous scientist named Carl Sagan kept warning about the risk of contaminating Earth with mysterious moon germs that could “multiply explosively.” Given the moon’s inhospitable environment, most scientists considered lunar disease exceedingly unlikely. But no one could deny it was a nonzero probability. In 1962, the National Academy of Sciences Space Science Board announced, rather alarmingly, that “the introduction into the Earth’s biosphere of destructive alien organisms could be a disaster of enormous significance to mankind.” NASA would spend millions (back when millions meant something) to quarantine moon rocks.
That all seems rather reasonable in hindsight. But we persist in dismissing as kooky people who prepare themselves for disasters we find unimaginable. The food supply has held up admirably during the coronavirus crisis, but given the nonzero probability that an economy on indefinite hold could strain supply chains, I don’t find the freeze-dried survivalist food business nearly as comical as I used to.
Which brings me to my own lack of imagination. I failed to imagine a 21st-century America in which a large part of the population would be on lockdown. I failed to imagine that just-in-time supply concepts had been applied to industries (read: healthcare) that should have deep redundancies. I failed to imagine a relief bill that would dwarf the one President Barack Obama presided over.
At least there were a few instances in which my instincts proved true. As I imagined, my neighbors have behaved with kindness and good humor — if at a distance. And as I imagined, the car thief who has been targeting my neighborhood for months has not been slowed in his enterprise, proving there are signs of life in the economy yet.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
