The title of this post is oxymoronic. It is also the title of a book published by the Harvard Business School Press in 2004[1]. Predictable Surprises are dangers which many of us know all along but do little to prevent or stem. In the following paragraphs, we explain some Predictable Surprises that have hit us in the last 25-30 years.
The COVID19 Pandemic –
and the Second Wave
The COVID19 pandemic was famously predicted as the greatest
threat to humankind by Bill Gates in a TED-X talk in 2015[2]). Several
epidemiologists the world over also predicted it, but none of these voices –
not even Bill Gates’s – were sufficiently heeded to prevent the Predictable Surprise
from causing untold damage.
Bill Gates said in 2015,
“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next
few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a
war. Not missiles, but microbes. … We're
not ready for the next epidemic … you can have a virus where people feel well
enough while they're infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market
… a virus spread through the air, like
the Spanish Flu back in 1918 … would spread throughout the world very, very
quickly.”
That led to a deadly global Predictable Surprise. Much
of the world, including the richer countries, was caught unawares.
We did not sufficiently heed the dire prognostications
of an exponentially larger ‘second wave’ – and many countries (among the worst
being India) were caught unprepared for a second Predictable Surprise. The
Third Wave has so far not had severe effect because we woke up partially – the
spike in cases has been mitigated by better medical infrastructure, beefed-up
vaccination drives and indications of possible ‘herd immunity’ by serological
surveys, indicating that a rising proportion of countries’ populations have
developed COVID19 antibodies.
About two decades before this, in a single year – 2001
– the world saw two predictable surprises unfold.
Failure of Auditor Independence
The Enron-led financial meltdown which came about
because of what we knew all along – conflict of interests of auditors leading to
unreliable financial statements. After Enron, other large corporates like
Worldcom and Global Crossing also bit the dust. This led (over the next year or
two) to many countries introducing laws and rules mandating auditor rotation
and prohibiting audit firms from taking up non-audit work for the same client
or client-group (a good example is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US). It is
widely understood that these rules only reduce but do not eliminate the
conflicts of interest.
Terrorism and the Aftermath
– More Autocratic Democracies, More War
The 9/11 Security Meltdown led to 3,000+deaths and
6,000+ injuries in the US alone. This was a Predictable Surprise because the US
Intelligence Community had been hearing of enough chatter about impending terrorist
attacks on the US mainland. They even heard that bin Laden might try to attack
US targets using airplanes as weapons. Yet, nothing was done to elevate the perceived
threat level of what the chatter indicated. This was a failure of
prioritisation by the US Political Leadership.
In the years that followed, hitherto democratic Governments
hid behind the fig leaf of the War on Terror to arm themselves with and regularly
misuse excessive surveillance and spying powers, especially the PATRIOT Act in
the US and the UAPA in India. The UAPA, though enacted first in 1967, has been significantly
amended 5 times since 2004, each amendment curtailing the privacy and freedom of
the country’s citizens. This includes spying on a large scale which Edward Snowden
famously blew the whistle on. Since then, has surveillance been curtailed?
Attempts have been made to curb this, like the USA Freedom Act in the US. (In
India, the individual privacy situation has gotten worse in the
last decade).
War was declared and affected several other countries including
Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Israel, Palestine, Syria in the decades
following the 9/11 Attacks. India too has suffered several terrorist attacks.
Choosing where to live: An Ongoing Predictable Surprise
California and Japan (Kyoto to Tokyo) are the Top Two Most
Risky places to live in, ranked by proneness to natural and man-made disasters –
· Japan with its Earthquakes
– (there are 100s of tremors every month), Tsunamis (they have happened often
enough to be one of the Japanese language words accepted into the English
lexicon, Nuclear Plant Meltdowns, and
· California in
the US with its risks of Forest Fires and pollution (happens every year, and for
upto 8 months every year), Earthquakes (there are 100s of tremors every month
in some places) and Volcanoes (the entire Yellowstone National Park is one huge
Caldera – it is the mouth of the largest on-land volcanic crater on Planet Earth).
SF regularly has huge sinkholes appear suddenly into which cars can get
swallowed.
· Southern Gulf of Mexico bordering
states face hurricanes and typhoons every year, even over
extremely populous areas. Eastern border states (NY/NJ/Mass/Penn etc) face blizzards
and snowstorms routinely almost every winter. Frequency of occurrence of such
extreme weather events has increased to an extent that it can no longer be denied
plausibly that this is in large part due to Climate Change which has been predicted
and denied in equal measure.
Yet, people live here in ever-growing numbers in complete
denial of these obvious risks – like frogs in the steadily heating up beaker. These
places are among the most densely populated places on Earth, having the world’s
costliest real estate. Choosing to live in these states ignoring Nature’s signals
is inviting Predictable Surprises into your door.
Tragedies of the Commons
This is a class of Predictable Surprises caused by
collapse of ecosystems because the incentives of an individual member of a
Group with common interests and shared resources has incentives that are opposed
to the Group’s well-being.
Excessive extraction of non-renewable resources, Drawing
excessive electricity from the electrical grid leading to grid collapse, Clearing
forests for agriculture, Freeloaders in Cooperative Societies who do not co-operate
with the majority, Over-extraction of ground water, too much livestock grazing,
over-fishing, and Burning of post-harvest sugarcane stumps before replanting
leading to pollution in Delhi are all examples of Predictable Surprises in the
form of collapse of the relevant ecosystem/ common resource.
Can you think of any more such Predictable Surprises?
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