Governments losing against Coronavirus: it's no coincidence

“One of the things that makes novels less plausible than history, I find,” says a character in Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day, “is the way they shrink from coincidence.”

We do try to reject coincidence. “This happened after that other thing happened, so it must have been that other thing that caused this one.” Post hoc ergo propter hoc, the Romans used to say, after that so because of that.

And yet there really are things that are simply coincidence, in the sense that they happen together, or after each other, purely by chance.

London had a population climbing towards seven million over the decade I was a student there (yep: I was once the proud owner of ten University of London student cards). And yet I hadn’t been there many years before I had my first experience of meeting people I knew, without arrangement, on the street. It happened to me several times over the period I lived there.

What? The chances of meeting any particular person out of 6.5m is, naturally, 6.5m to 1. And yet I several times met individuals I knew?

We are not intuitively good at handling statistical reasoning, as the psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman has pointed out. I had a wide network of acquaintance, which immediately increased the chance of meeting any one of them by chance. And it was not as though I only ever crossed the path of one other person in any one day – on the contrary, commuting from home to work or to college brought me close to hundreds or even thousands of people (hence the difficulty of maintaining social distancing today).

Take that into account, and the probability of meeting someone I knew was significantly higher than I might have imagined. Certainly, high enough for it to be perfectly reasonable that it should happen several times over a ten-year period. Particularly when you consider that most frequently the encounters were in places which act like people-funnels, such as the main railway stations.

In fact, the most surprising such event I witnessed was just last year, as I was catching up with a Turkish friend, Muharrem, who was about to enter Victoria Station ahead of me. I found him in lively conversation, in Turkish, with a woman. After she had left, Muharrem explained to me, “she’s one of the most famous novelists in Turkey, and I met her when I was working at a library where she came to give a talk”.

Despite this kind of experience, we do shrink from coincidence. Indeed, that shrinking becomes a weapon in the armoury of people trying to build certain kinds of argument. They might, for instance, say:

“My friend Sally took that medication. And exactly two years, five months and 17 days later, she had a series of terrible migraines. Coincidence? I think not.”

It’s a great debating trick, because it establishes in advance that only the most naïve and credulous people could possibly respond, “well, actually, yes, I reckon it probably is a coincidence.” As, of course, it is.

After all, Sally probably took other things than that medication before getting her migraines. If anything that happened before them could be regarded as a potential cause, might it not have been the chocolate she had the day before, or the overindulgence in wine, or the fact she drove through a polluted neighbourhood? After that so because of that isn’t an argument, it’s a sloppy and unreliable way of reasoning.

To establish that there’s more than chance at play, we have to show some causal connection between the two incidents.

To take a different example, naturally chosen entirely at random, consider lousy government. Faced with a major and fatal pandemic disease, a lousy government fails to take it seriously. It may attempt to put in place measures to protect its healthcare workers, and even promise to do so, and then take far too long and under-deliver. It may, rightly, identify track-and-trace as the best way to combat the virus, promise to put a system in place and then fail to meet its own deadline.

Or lousy government might just be far too glib in attitude. It may be scornful about simple and effective measures like wearing masks. It may pay lip service to other measures, such as social distancing or quarantining, while flouting them itself and turning a blind eye to infringements by friends or supporters. It may be halfhearted about its lockdown measures and end them too soon.

Now which governments around the world have been most guilty of some or all of these kinds of behaviour?

Why, the governments Trump’s United States, Johnson’s UK and Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Which makes it fascinating to look at the latest figures published by Worldometers. Imagine which are the governments with the highest numbers of deaths due to Coronavirus:

The three nations with the worst Coronavirus death totals
Note that Johnson's UK has the worst death rate per million

A coincidence? I think not.

Oaks rather than mere iron

It’s always fun, or at least more often fun than it is instructive, to work your way through those self-help books that teach you all the wisdom you need to succeed in business, society or indeed life generally.

They tend to pick anecdotes carefully to illustrate their points. That makes me think of a vital principle from that unquestionably valuable book, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking fast and slow, “what you see is all there is”. We chuckle over one anecdote that seems to make an author’s point and conclude that it’s representative, rather than exceptional, and therefore proves a law. Often that’s a wild presumption.

Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way is the latest of these texts that I’m working through, and it’s certainly proving fun. That doesn’t mean I’m convinced: he argues, for example, that we need to focus on the thing in front of us, the task to be undertaken immediately, and not be distracted by visions of the remote goal. I’m convinced that it wouldn’t take long to find a book arguing, with equal conviction, for the opposition point of view, backing some variant of “not seeing the wood for the trees” to argue that without a vision of the whole, the work on any detail is likely to be misguided.

One of Holiday’s better anecdotes concerns Sam Zemurray. In the early years of the twentieth century, he was involved in a struggle with one of America’s leading corporations, United Fruit, for ownership of 5000 acres of land in Guatemala, ideally suited to the growing of bananas. The problem was that two individuals were in dispute for ownership of the land, so who could sell it?

United Fruit shipped in high-powered lawyers and set to work examining all the documents so they could establish, beyond all doubt, who had title to the land. This was an array of resources their competitor couldn’t match. That was a game they were bound to win.

Zemurray simply called in both putative owners and bought the land off both of them. So he paid twice. But he had the land. 

He beat them by playing a different game.

What Holiday doesn’t mention is that Zemurray later engineered a coup in Guatemala and eventually won control of United Fruit himself. A role model? I think perhaps not.

Still, he showed great ingenuity in winning that first battle. Ingenuity and above all, flexibility. That’s the notion I want to focus on.

Another book I’m not so much reading as listening to – one of the beauties of dog walking – is a biography of George Thomas. He was, in my view, probably the best of the US Civil War generals, and perhaps even one of the best generals of any war, anywhere in the last couple of centuries. He never lost a battle, he won the Union’s most comprehensive victory, and he never wasted his men’s lives in hopeless, glorious, criminal charges.

One of the generals who served with him, and later became President of the United States, James A. Garfield, said of him that he was “not a man of iron but of living oak”. That description struck me as highly attractive. Unlike iron, living oakwood is strong and yet adaptable, in that it will bend with the wind to avoid breaking, though it can also withstand a great deal. Above all, it is, as Garfield’s words especially underline, alive with all that implies of warmth and openness to other living beings.

That in turn got me thinking of a more recent time when “iron” was used as an epithet for character. The “Iron Lady” was Maggie Thatcher. She was truly iron in just the way that Thomas was not. Inflexible, sure she was right, she purused the objectives her ideology dictated to her inexorably and without compassion.

Her baleful shadow hangs over us still . Britain has been pursuing Thatcher-style austerity for seven years, with the stated aim of reducing debt – which has doubled. It still regards “regulation” a dirty word – and the terrible fire that killed at least 80 in Grenfell Tower has shown where that leads.

The difference now is that signs are beginning to emerge of a tiredness with this dogmatism. Far more people voted against the Tories in the recent general election than many of us expected. The most recent social attitudes survey shows opinion beginning to harden against austerity . And the decision to prosecute people, 30 years on, for the deaths of 96 people at the Hillsborough football stadium disaster interestingly includes charges that health and safety concerns were ignored, as at Grenfell Tower. Generally, the terms “health and safety” tend to be followed by the words “gone mad”, to make the notion a favourite butt of the anti-regulation crowd.

Well, maybe just as people are realising that austerity can be bad for your health, they’re also waking up to the fact that health and safety are to be cherished rather than despised.

Could this be the dawning of a time for people of living oak rather than iron ladies?

Those who emulate the ingenuity and flexibility of Zemurray, rather than Thatcher’s obstinacy?

Although perhaps we needn’t going quite so far i following him as to back coups in vulnerable foreign nations...

Kahneman the key to Corbyn

There are books that teach you things you never knew. There are books that teach you things you’ve known for ages but never realised. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking fast and slow does both.

Kahneman: powerful insights

One of the common mechanisms of the human mind Kahneman describes is the substitution of one, relatively easy question for another much harder one. He gives the example of a financial adviser who’d recently been to a motor exhibition and had been impressed by the Ford stand. He advised buying Ford stock.

The question he was trying to answer was “is Ford stock a good investment?” That’s a hard question. Answering it means understanding a stock’s future behaviour which, as Kahneman argues later, is essentially unpredictable.

So instead the analyst answered a much easier one: “how do I feel about Ford?”

That’s a way of thinking with which we must all be familiar in daily life. It seems to me to mark a great deal of the thinking of voters, for instance. They may be concerned about static incomes and rising uncertainty, but these are tough questions to which they find it hard to come up with answers. So instead they ask themselves “do I feel threatened by immigrants?”

That one many voters apparently have no difficulty answering in the affirmative. It, however, only leads to a further question: “how do I limit immigration?”

That too is impossibly difficult. So they answer yet another, much easier question. In the US, they answer “shall I vote for a maverick populist?” In Britain, the question is “should we leave the EU?”

It seems obvious to most of us that backing Trump or Brexit answers no question worth asking. Neither will be able to deal with immigration, in so far as immigration is a problem at all in the first place. And neither will reduce instability in work or raise wages: indeed, both are far more likely to make the problems far worse.

Answering the wrong question can give the wrong answer.

The same is true inside the UK Labour Party. There the question is “do we have a leader who can be elected Prime Minister?”

With a poll deficit of around 14-16 points as we approach two years into the parliament, it would be unprecedented for that to happen. Not impossible but owing more to the miraculous rather than the rational. That makes the question far too hard – not because the answer’s beyond us but because the answer hurts.

So supporters of Jeremy Corbyn answer different questions: “do Jeremy Corbyn’s ideas appeal to me? Would he be a Prime Minister after my own heart?”

Since his followers answer those questions in the affirmative, they insist on keeping him in the leadership. The evidence of a deepening gulf in the polls shakes their faith not at all.

The wrong question. Leading to the wrong answer. Just as Kahneman shows.

Familiarity breeds belief

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”

The words are Daniel Kahneman’s from his Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. Both a young friend of mine and one of my sons had repeatedly urged me to read this excellent book, but though I started it twice, somehow on each occasion I let other things take over and gave up before I’d got far.

Now, however, I’m making good progress and delighted by the insights it provides me, not least the sentiment I’ve just quoted.

Daniel Kahneman.
A Nobel-prize winner I should have paid attention to earlier

There’s an old principle that I’ve always believed, that the truth is often the best thing to tell, if only because it’s the version of events you know best so you’re less likely to get it wrong and end up contradicting yourself. The truth is easy because it’s familiar. It took Kahneman to point out the converse: if it’s familiar, there’s a serious risk you’ll take it for the truth whether it is or isn’t. As he points out, you don’t even have to repeat the entire statement to convince someone of a falsehood.

People who were repeatedly exposed to the phrase “the body temperature of a chicken” were more likely to accept as true the statement that “the body temperature of a chicken is 144°” (or any other arbitrary number). The familiarity of one phrase in the statement sufficed to make the whole statement feel familiar, and therefore true.

We all know that mechanism from within ourselves. Someone tells us a piece of news, and if our first reaction is, “I’ve heard that” then not far behind will be the notion, “it must be true”. If we reflect on the information more carefully – the slow thinking, or “System 2”, of Kahneman’s analysis – we may well reject it, but our first reaction is to believe what we’ve already heard. And how many people go to that analytic phase? As Kahneman points out, System 1, the intuitive reaction is easy; System 2 is effortful and difficult.

Incidentally, I’m making no claim to superiority here: these are statements about all of us – I know that System 2 thinking is as laborious for me as for anyone, and I’m as inclined as everyone else to go with System 1 gut feel if possible.

So, say it often enough, and a proportion of the US electorate will believe that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. The evidence is strongly against that belief, but analysis of evidence is a System 2 activity. Even less considered is the seldom-mentioned view that it’s irrelevant anyway: the US Constitution doesn’t require candidates for the presidency to be born in the States, only to be born American. So John McCain could run, though he was born in the Panama Canal zone, and George Romney (father of Mitt) could be a candidate too, in 1968, despite being born in Mexico.

Again, absorbing that information requires System 2 behaviour.

Now consider the Fox News announcement that the attacker at the Quebec Mosque was himself a Muslim. The suggestion was that the six worshippers killed and the nineteen wounded had been targeted by a Muslim terrorist.

The story was untrue. The killer was a Canadian known to the police for his extreme right-wing views. Fox eventually admitted as much and deleted the item. By then, though, it had spread like wildfire across social media.

Would you be prepared to bet that this false story, made familiar by repetition, is now disbelieved by everyone?

Trump, whose favourite news channel is Fox, is emerging as a master of this kind of disinformation. Faced with the refusal of the scandal which may, in time, sink him – his campaign’s contacts with Russia, a story that feels like a new Watergate – he has hit back by accusing Barack Obama of having wiretapped Trump tower. 

Repeatedly hit back.

Trump has offered no evidence for his claim. Indeed, despite having decried unsourced stories himself, he has given no source for it. But evidence and awareness of hypocrisy are System 2 activities.

I don’t know what will come of the accusations. There have been some authoritative denials already but someone may emerge with some supporting information. It doesn’t matter. The story’s out there. It’s being repeated. It’ll become familiar. Many will see it as true. Not just about Obama, either: this is part of a flow of apparent information which will ultimately leave many with the feeling that any opponent of Trump’s is devious or even evil.

The converse also applies. Trump keeps telling us how much he’s achieved and how well his administration is running. In reality, there have been no achievements and the administration is chaotic. Again, it doesn’t matter. His claims will be picked up. They’ll become familiar. They’ll be believed.

There’s not much that’s funny about the post-truth age. But at least we can be grateful to Daniel Kanehman for exposing the mechanisms by which it works.