Pandemie und Politik

By NZZ Libro

Lehren aus der Pandemie
Auch 2021 drehte sich wieder vieles in der Welt um das Thema Corona, in anderen Facetten, aber durchaus länger, als man gehofft hatte. Die Krise hat weiterhin Themen nationaler wie internationaler Politik und Wirtschaft beeinflusst, und entsprechend widmeten sich die Veranstaltungen und Gespräche den Themen «Pandemie und Politik». Das Jahrbuch präsentiert eine Rückschau auf unsere renommierten Rednerinnen und Redner sowie unseren Austausch mit ihnen.
Mit Beiträgen von Mervyn King, Gerhard Schwarz, Ilaria Capua, Christian Lindner, Niall Ferguson, Alain Berset, Anne Applebaum, Sahra Wagenknecht, Elif Shafak und Bertrand Piccard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NZZ Libro
• Release date: Jun 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9783907396124

Book preview

SOZIALWISSENSCHAFTLICHE STUDIEN

DES SCHWEIZERISCHEN INSTITUTS FÜR

AUSLANDFORSCHUNG

BAND 48 (NEUE FOLGE)

Begründet von

Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Friedrich A. Lutz (†)

www.siaf.ch

Pandemie und Politik

Herausgegeben von Martin Meyer

und Sabine Sura

Mit Beiträgen von Mervyn King, Gerhard Schwarz,

Ilaria Capua, Christian Lindner, Niall Ferguson, Alain Berset,

Sahra Wagenknecht, Elif Shafak,

Bertrand Piccard

NZZ Libro

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

Der Text des E-Books folgt der gedruckten

1. Auflage 2022 (ISBN 978-3-907396-11-7)

© 2022 NZZ Libro, Schwabe Verlagsgruppe AG, Basel

Lektorat: Monika Sieg (deutsch) und Ashley Curtis (englisch)

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Inhalt

Vorwort

MERVYN KING

Uncertainty, Disruption, Hope – How to Analyse the Current World of Economics and Politics

GERHARD SCHWARZ

Die Schweiz hat Zukunft – Von der positiven Kraft der Eigenart

ILARIA CAPUA

The Circular Nature of the COVID-19 Pandemic

CHRISTIAN LINDNER

Pandemie, Klima, Digitalisierung: die liberalen Gesellschaftsordnungen im globalen Systemwettbewerb

NIALL FERGUSON

The Great Disasters of the Past and Some Lessons for the Future

ALAIN BERSET

Pandemie. Politik. Gesellschaft.

SAHRA WAGENKNECHT

Warum wir wieder mehr Zusammenhalt und Gemeinsinn brauchen

ELIF SHAFAK

Politics – Society – Literature: Between East and West

BERTRAND PICCARD

Pioneering Spirit to Invent the Future

Vorwort

Im erneut durch Covid geprägten Frühjahrssemester präsentierten wir handverlesene Gäste im Gespräch aus dem Studio sowie aus dem Literaturhaus und hoben dabei gleichzeitig ein neues Format aus der Taufe: Unsere «SIAF Talks» werden wir auch weiterhin als gute Diskussion vor die Kamera und zu Ihnen nach Hause bringen. Unsere klassischen Vorträge an der Universität dagegen ermöglichen neben dem zusätzlichen Livestreaming-Angebot wieder die persönliche Begegnung vor Ort – und im Herbst konnten wir hier eine nie dagewesene Anzahl und Vielfalt bieten.

Auch 2021 drehte sich wieder vieles in der Welt um das Thema Corona, in anderen Facetten, aber länger, als man gehofft hatte. Die Krise hat weiterhin Themen nationaler wie internationaler Politik und Wirtschaft beeinflusst, und unser Jahrbuch taufen wir entsprechend Pandemie und Politik. Wir freuen uns über diese Rückschau zu den spannenden Veranstaltungen und Gesprächen mit unseren Gästen.

Wir danken allen Partnern, den Referierenden und einer Öffentlichkeit, die uns die Treue hält, für die wertvolle Unterstützung, und freuen uns bereits darauf, Sie auch in den kommenden Semestern wieder begrüssen zu dürfen.

Zürich, im Frühjahr 2022

Dr. Martin Meyer, Präsident des Vorstands SIAF

Sabine Sura, Leiterin der Geschäftsstelle

Uncertainty, Disruption, Hope – How to Analyse the Current World of Economics and Politics

MERVYN KING

Discussion of 31 March 2021

The former Governor of the Bank of England in conversation with Walter B. Kielholz, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Swiss Reinsurance Company, and Thomas Jordan, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank.

MARTIN MEYER:

A very warm welcome to our guests, especially to Mervyn King, Lord King of Lothbury, former Governor of the Bank of England, Professor at New York University and other eminent institutions – not to mention a former guest speaker at our institute, on an occasion that is very well remembered. Good evening, Lord King, from Zurich to London, from where we are ‘beaming’ you in. It is an honour and a joy to have you with us.

MERVYN KING:

And it’s my pleasure to join you.

MARTIN MEYER:

Wonderful, thank you. I hope you are in good health, and in good spirits.

MERVYN KING:

Absolutely. Sad only that I cannot be with you in person, in Zurich.

MARTIN MEYER:

We will do that next March. That’s a promise. The same of course goes for our friends Thomas Jordan, Head of the Swiss National Bank, and Walter Kielholz, Chairman of Swiss Re. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for joining us for an interesting evening here at the Centre for Global Dialogue in Rüschlikon, near Zurich.

Our topic tonight reads ‘Uncertainty, disruption, hope’: a subject that is perfectly appropriate not only to the current situation, but also to our highly accelerated times. The starting point for our discussion is even more fitting. Earlier last year, Mervyn King and the economist John Kay published a book which got a lot of attention. The book’s title is Radical Uncertainty, and the subtitle reads Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers. Now, we have to realise that the book was published only a few weeks before the corona pandemic emerged and then exploded – an almost magical, almost alchemistic coincidence. And an excellent occasion to invite Lord King here to Zurich to talk with us about our current problems and challenges. And, of course, to discuss them with two eminent scholars in their own fields, Walter Kielholz and Thomas Jordan, long-time friends of Mervyn King.

MERVYN KING:

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be able to discuss the topic of uncertainty with my two distinguished colleagues on the podium. In our book, John Kay and I distinguish between resolvable uncertainty and what we call radical uncertainty. Resolvable uncertainty is the simple kind, the kind that you can describe in terms of probabilities, like tossing a coin that you know is a fair coin; there is a 50 percent chance that it will come down heads.

Radical uncertainty is different. Radical uncertainty is uncertainty that you cannot quantify. The best example of it is actually COVID-19, the challenge we’ve been facing now for over a year. And the reason why it’s so important, and why it’s such a good example, is that it is different from a Black Swan event, which is something you can’t conceivably imagine until you’ve seen it. Because while we knew that there were pandemics, we couldn’t possibly have said, in the middle of 2019, that the probability that a virus would come out of Wuhan in China in December 2019 was 17 percent, 27 percent, or any other number. That would have been a meaningless and distracting statement. Equally, with the banking crisis in 2008: we knew that banking crises existed; we’d been through many of them in several hundred years, in most advanced economies. But that did not enable anybody to say that the probability that Lehman Brothers would collapse in September 2008 was some particular number.

So, radical uncertainty is uncertainty that cannot be quantified. Now, why does this matter? Well, I want to draw out four implications of radical uncertainty, and then to conclude with why we should nevertheless be hopeful.

The first implication of radical uncertainty is that there is no mathematical or objective way of quantifying all risks. We therefore cannot price such risks. If you know the probability of something happening is 50 percent, and you know what the consequences of the event will be, it’s possible – quite straightforwardly – to calibrate what the risk is. That’s what we tend to do with life insurance. But with radical uncertainty there are events where we don’t know what the probability is, and it requires tremendous judgement to be able to successfully quote prices for insurance against those risks. That is the skill of reinsurers, and, of course, especially of Swiss Re. It requires experience and judgement and a culture of understanding risks to be able to offer that kind of insurance. It’s not a simple mathematical calculation.

The second implication is that the world is – in the technical jargon – non-stationary. What we see happening is not simply a random drawing from a known distribution. The world is continuously changing. And that means that we cannot even imagine a simple probability distribution informed by events from the past.

The third implication is that there is far too much bogus quantification in the world. We’ve seen that economic forecasts are typically very poor. The interesting thing in the past 12 months is that the same poor performance in terms of predictions is true of epidemiological models. Now, why is this the case? Models can be very helpful in understanding the nature of a problem. They enable us to simplify, and to focus on the factors that really matter in understanding what is likely to happen in the future. But the reason that economic forecasts and epidemiological forecasts are so poor is that we do not have the information required to judge the values of the key parameters that will determine the path of an epidemic or the path of the economy.

And this is important, because last March, what should have happened was that the epidemiologists should not have tried to make predictions about the path of COVID-19. They should instead have said: ‘These are the key parameters that we need to know and understand in order to judge the future paths’; and so, for example, governments should have been encouraged to carry out random samples of the population and test them, in order to determine the mortality rate of the virus. Because although we knew the numerator – the number of deaths – we didn’t know the denominator – the number of people in the population already infected.

The fourth and last implication I draw out is that there is a very important role for the question, ‘What is going on here?’ I suspect this question plays a prominent role in Swiss Re, and in almost all organisations that are successful in making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. ‘What is going on here?’ sounds like a rather trivial question, but it isn’t, because when we’re confronted with a unique event, an event that we haven’t seen before – we may have seen something similar, but not exactly the same – we have to keep asking the question ‘What is going on here?’ in order to understand the nature of the problem we’re confronted with and then to think through the right answer.

This is particularly important because one of the big challenges for the future is how best to use artificial intelligence. There are many people, including the psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman, who believe that decisions should be made by computers rather than humans, because humans make mistakes, but computers don’t make mistakes of mathematical reasoning. I think this idea is profoundly wrong. It relies on the assumption that the most important decisions we take are ones that can be solved purely by mathematical reasoning, and I don’t believe that’s true. When we’re faced with radical uncertainty, our judgement, experience, and ability to adapt to an unknown situation all matter, and we make use of them together. We do this not as individuals solving problems; rather, we work together to find the solutions to challenges of radical uncertainty.

Finally, we come to hope. There are two reasons why we should be hopeful now for the future. The first is that we’ve learned a great deal about the importance of resilience. After the financial crisis, we learned that it was important that the banking system be resilient, and we changed the regulations to ensure that banks had to issue more equity capital, had to have more liquid assets on their balance sheets, in order to be resilient to unknown disturbances occurring. Sadly, we didn’t apply that lesson to other parts of the economy, and we’ve now seen that we needed our health systems to be more resilient.

The two countries best prepared on paper for a pandemic were the United States and the United Kingdom. That turned out to be false, and the reason is that they had prepared for a pandemic caused by a particular kind of virus: a flu virus. What we got instead was a different kind of virus. We need to prepare for a generic virus. The resilience of our healthcare system is crucial. And resilience is also crucial for businesses. The just-in-time delivery model is bound to be rethought. People will undoubtedly now realise that continuous deliveries and movements of people across borders cannot be guaranteed. Everything we do needs to be resilient to major uncertainties and shocks.

And lastly, we shouldn’t be frightened of uncertainty; we should actually embrace it. Because uncertainty is actually the source of almost all good things in life. When Frank Knight wrote his famous book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit exactly 100 years ago, he believed that radical uncertainty was the source of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs come up with new products and new processes; they don’t just turn a handle on a computer, plug in probabilities and outcomes, and look at the maximising solution that results. Uncertainty generates entrepreneurship, and it’s also the source of great happiness in our personal, business and collective lives. Students often say to me when they leave university that they’re very frightened of the uncertainty about their future lives. And I say to them, ‘You shouldn’t be. You don’t want to know today who you will marry and when; you don’t want to know what jobs you will