We must expect to be hit by an epidemic of an infectious disease resulting from a virus which does not yet exist,” write John Kay and Mervyn King in their book about how to handle an unknowable future, which was published in March. Radical Uncertainty helps us think about our current predicament. It’s also a poignantly Oedipal attack on the terribly flawed economics profession that spawned these two authors.
Six months ago, if you were studying the possibility of a global pandemic, you would have noted that there hadn’t been one of the scale of the Spanish flu in the West in a century. You might have calculated that the probability of one was so negligible it wasn’t worth preparing for. Indeed, the Trump administration closed down the pandemic response team in the White House in 2018, and eliminated the post of a US epidemiologist embedded in China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. However, other countries did prepare. Angela Merkel raised the possibility of a pandemic in one of her first private talks with Donald Trump.
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