You Can Predict that Your Predictions Will Be Wrong

If you're at all like me (read: someone who reads a lot of long-form and opinion journalism), the last couple months have left you with serious pundit fatigue. There are a lot of people out there who are paid to tell us, with utmost confidence, what the next month, six months, year, or decade is about to bring. I've read so many versions of The World Will Never Be the Same or This Is the End of ______ or This Will Lead to the Rebirth of ______ at this point that, even though many have been thought-provoking reads, they've all started to blend together for me into something as unappetizing as mixing a bit of every soda from the soda dispenser at McDonald's into the same cup. (You know you had that one elementary-school friend who did that. Unless you were that kid, you monster.)

So it was like a refreshing drink of cool water instead to read a recent Yascha Mounk piece in The Atlantic (misleadingly titled "Prepare for the Roaring Twenties"). Mounk's actual thesis is not that, post-coronavirus, we'll see a decade of at least as many mass gatherings, and people eager to participate in them, as before—though he does say there's reason to expect this. His actual, more interesting, thesis is that whatever you think the repercussions of the pandemic will be, you're mostly wrong. And in fact, most things will likely change less than you think they will.

Mounk's essay introduced me to the wonderful term chronocentrism. I now have a name for something that's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time: 

When confronted with disaster, believing that everything will change is all too easy. How is it possible to write poems after Auschwitz, to enjoy a Sunday stroll in Lower Manhattan following 9/11, or, indeed, to dine in restaurants after a pandemic kills hundreds of thousands of people in the span of a few cruel months? 

In 1974, the sociologist Jib Fowles coined the term chronocentrism, “the belief that one’s own times are paramount, that other periods pale in comparison.” The past few weeks have, understandably, confronted us with an especially loud chorus of chronocentric voices claiming that we are on the cusp of unprecedented change. Academics, intellectuals, politicians, and entrepreneurs have made sweeping pronouncements about the transformations that the pandemic will spur.

The obvious parallel for the argument that COVID-19 will transform less about our lives than we think it will is staring us in the face: the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed somewhere between 1% and 6% of the world's population, and is actually (Mounk points out) one of very few visible blips on the upward curve of world population over the centuries. And yet the trauma of the pandemic did not fundamentally alter human social behavior. This shouldn't surprise us: the fact that we are innately social, and tactile, creatures has been a constant of history... even though so has infectious disease.

“I wouldn’t rule out truly historic transformations”—but don’t bank on a specific one.

Mounk's observation has implications for how we think about cities and their future. For one thing, it exposes the silliness of the "end of cities" / "end of suburbs" / "rebirth of the suburbs" debate with regard to social distancing and fear of disease. Density is bad! Density is good! Downtown is over! Public transit is done for! When you zoom out on history beyond the current moment, it becomes clear that it's likely going to take a lot more than COVID-19 to permanently shift how we arrange our lives and our habitat.

Mounk also sagely observes that the path from a clearly dysfunctional system to one that a critical mass of power brokers can agree is better one is not a straight line: 

The pandemic, some argue, has shown the need for single-payer health care and demonstrated the lunacy of relying on a just-in-time manufacturing process that makes the global production of essential goods vulnerable to shocks in faraway countries.

But many institutions persist despite deep flaws because those who would benefit from change can’t work together effectively or agree on a replacement. Just about everybody agrees that the UN Security Council is, in its current form, incapable of keeping the peace in the world’s most imperiled regions, such as Syria. But because different governments have different visions of how the council should be reformed—and because those that have a permanent seat are reluctant to dilute their influence—the system keeps trudging along.

These same problems of collective action also make an abrupt end to globalization or neoliberalism unlikely.

And yet it would be wrong to assume that nothing will radically change as a result of, if not the pandemic itself, its potentially snowballing macroeconomic consequences. History also shows us that dysfunctional, sclerotic institutions do collapse, and often spectacularly suddenly and completely. Rickety bridges sooner or later fail. In fact, this outcome—that a system that isn't working stumbles along until it falls apart and is replaced with a new order—is perhaps more likely than the alternative: that it reforms itself in a rationally and predictable way.

Or, says Mounk, "I wouldn’t rule out truly historic transformations—just our ability to know what they will be."

Fragile vs. Resilient

And so this finally brings us to the flip side of the chronocentrism argument—what if the times we’re living in really are exceptional and unprecedented? The world has faced pandemics before—but perhaps never with an economy as over-leveraged or as dependent on fragile global supply chains. The U.S. has faced recessions before—but never at a time of such institutional upheaval and such low public faith in those institutions.

We published a piece in April titled This is the End of the Suburban Experiment. We may be committing the precise fallacy that Mounk is calling out. Time will tell. That piece, though, if you read it is less an attempt to predict the future with precision, and more about pointing out the fragility of a set of social and spatial arrangements that likely can’t continue indefinitely without succumbing to the law of entropy.

You can point out when something is liable to fail. Or when it’s likely to prove resilient. Such conclusions are on firmer ground than grand pronouncements about what the future holds.

“And so this finally brings us to the flip side of the chronocentrism argument—what if the times we’re living in really are exceptional and unprecedented?”

Nassim Taleb writes about the Lindy Effect: the observation that the future life expectancy of non-perishable things like a technology or an idea tends to be proportional to their current age. The longer something has been around, the longer you should bet on it to stay around. To understand this, imagine three books: one was published in 1520 and is widely read today; another was published in 1920 and is widely read today; the third was published last year and is widely read today. Which is most likely to be widely read in the year 2120? In the year 2520? Which is least likely?

It takes some hubris to confidently assert what the future will be like. But you’re on firmer ground recognizing that if you have to bet, bet on the continued viability of traditional urban patterns which have persisted for thousands of years, all over the world. Things like streets designed for walking, neighborhoods built to the human scale, and places designed for us to rub shoulders with one another. The smart money isn’t on an experimental urban arrangement—the automobile-oriented commuter metropolis—that’s dependent on a barely 100-year old transportation technology, a less than 200-year-old fossil fuel revolution, and a whole lot of debt financing.

Beyond that observation, it’s entirely possible that we end up successfully propping up many of those arrangements and keeping the party going. It’s also possible that we don’t. Anyone who tells you they know exactly how the world is going to change is a fraud or a fool.

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