The world is changing, and increasingly uncertain

Farhad Manjoo, Admit It: You Don’t Know What Will Happen Next, NYTimes, Feb 26, 2020.

A projection of certainty is often a crucial part of commentary; nobody wants to listen to a wishy-washy pundit. But I worry that unwarranted certainty, and an under-appreciation of the unknown, might be our collective downfall, because it blinds us to a new dynamic governing humanity: The world is getting more complicated, and therefore less predictable.

Yes, the future is always unknowable. But there’s reason to believe it’s becoming even more so, because when it comes to affairs involving masses of human beings — which is most things, from politics to markets to religion to art and entertainment — a range of forces is altering society in fundamental ways. These forces are easy to describe as Davos-type grand concepts: among others, the internet, smartphones, social networks, the globalization and interdependence of supply chains and manufacturing, the internationalization of culture, unprecedented levels of travel, urbanization and climate change. But their effects are not discrete. They overlap and intertwine in nonlinear ways, leaving chaos in their wake.

In the last couple of decades, the world has become unmoored, crazier, somehow messier. The black swans are circling; chaos monkeys have been unleashed. And whether we’re talking about the election, the economy, or most any other corner of humanity, we in the pundit class would do well more often to strike a note of humility in the face of the expanding unknown. We ought to add a disclaimer to everything we say: “I could be wrong! We all could be wrong!”