Quotidian Address

The coronavirus outbreak in China has me thinking about disease. Outbreaks remind me that this is quite possibly how the world ends: not with a bang, but a cough. Being ready for disease outbreaks is challenging. It is hard to know how likely they are, or how bad they’ll be when they start. Some seem serious, and fizzle out: others seem fine, and suddenly become crises (think how the yearly flu suddenly became Spanish flu in 1918, and killed more people than both world wars). In other words, pandemics are a black swan: a hard-to-predict, rare, and high-impact event. At the same time, preparing for them is a public good: the whole world benefits if a country has better disease detection and response systems, because it reduces how far the disease spreads. Like all public goods, I suspect that means the world is underprepared: for the same reason that no one wants to act on climate change, no one wants to be the one that invests in disease prevention as much as they should, ...

Stealing a page from your book, I've also had a think about what draws me into writing this blog. In addition to the great reasons you've laid out, especially that of bringing us closer together, I think I have two goals. The first is to practice the art of expressing myself in writing. For much of my life, writing was something I approached with reluctance, preferring the fluidity of mathematics and her related disciplines. When I wrote at all, it was usually to fulfill an externally imposed burden, a requirement I had to meet to proceed with what I wanted. Recently, though, I've been shown a different perspective. Writing, even my halting attempts at it, is a wondrously multifaceted endeavour. It is the record of our communications with ourselves, the process of structuring coherence from the inchoate fog of thought, the puzzle of finding just the right word or image. It is a grand game, and I'm grateful that you've given me this opportunity to play at it toget...

Hey,   So for my first post, I thought I should start by reflecting on why we—or at least I—are doing this. I’m a policy person. I like starting with what problem I’m trying to solve. There are far too many solutions in the world that don’t have a problem to solve (I’m looking at you, Bitcoin). So, what problem is this blog trying to solve? The world is such a noisy and complicated place: there’s a constant flow of information, whether it’s at work, from social media, or Netflix. That makes for a lot of headlines, but I’m not sure there are that many trendlines. I’m hoping we can use this blog to think about what’s really important. How should we be thinking about and reacting to things like climate change, demographic shifts, automation, artificial intelligence, populism, the rise of China, trade wars, inequality, migration, and social media? Do those things matter, and if so how much? I’m not sure I can always tell what’s important in this world of ours, and even whe...