A recent post offered an overview of a book by John Kay and Mervyn King titled “Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future”. It is a rich topic and this post covers the underlying drivers that tend to result in radically uncertain outcomes.
Kay and King nominate “reflexivity” as a key driver of radical uncertainty
The sociologist Robert K. Merton identified reflexivity as a distinctive property of social systems–the system itself is influenced by our beliefs about it. The idea of reflexivity was developed by the Austrian émigré philosopher Karl Popper and became central to the thinking of Popper’s student, the highly successful hedge fund manager George Soros. And it would form part of the approach to macroeconomics of the Chicago economist Robert Lucas and his followers … although their perspective on the problem and its solution would be very different.
Reflexivity undermines stationarity. This was the essence of ‘Goodhart’s Law’–any business or government policy which assumed stationarity of social and economic relationships was likely to fail because its implementation would alter the behaviour of those affected and therefore destroy that stationarity.
Kay and King, Chapter 3: Radical Uncertainty is Everywhere”
Radical uncertainty also features in Richard Bookstaber’s book “The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction”. Bookstaber identifies four broad phenomena he argues are endemic to financial crises
Emergent phenomena.
“When systemwide dynamics arise unexpectedly out of the activities of individuals in a way that is not simply an aggregation of that behavior, the result is known as emergence”.Non-ergodicity.
“An ergodic process … is one that does not vary with time or experience.
Our world is not ergodic—yet economists treat it as though it is.”Radical uncertainty.
“Emergent phenomena and non-ergodic processes combine to create outcomes that do not fit inside defined probability distributions.”Computational irreducibility.
Bookstaber, Chapter 2: Being Human
“There is no formula that allows us to fast-forward to find out what the result will be. The world cannot be solved; it has to be lived.“
If you want to delve into the detail of why the world can be radically uncertain then Bookstaber arguably offers the more detailed account; albeit one couched in technical language like emergent phenomena, ergodicity and computational irreducibility. In Chapter 10 he lays out the ways in which an agent based modelling approach to the problem of radical uncertainty would need to specify the complexity of the system in a structured way that takes account of the amount of information required to describe the system and the connectedness of its components. Bookstaber also offers examples of emergent phenomena in seemingly simple systems (e.g. Gary Conways’s “Game of Life”) which give rise to surprisingly complex outcomes.
I am not sure if either book makes this point explicitly but I think there is also an underlying theme in which the models that provide the illusion of control over an uncertain future create an incentive to “manage” risk in ways that increases the odds of bad outcomes based on insufficient resilience. That seems to be the clear implication of Kay and King’s discussion of the limits of finance theory (Chapter 17: The World of Finance). They acknowledge the value of the intellectual rigour built on the contributions of Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe and Eugene Fama but highlight the ways in which it has failed to live up to its promiseI .
We note two very different demonstrations of that failure. One is that the models used by regulators and financial institutions, directly derived from academic research in finance, not only failed to prevent the 2007–08 crisis but actively contributed to it. Another is to look at the achievements of the most successful investors of the era – Warren Buffett, George Soros and Jim Simons. Each has built fortunes of tens of billions of dollars. They are representative of three very different styles of investing.
Kay and King, Chapter 17 The World of Finance
I plan to do one more post exploring the ways in which we navigate a world of radical uncertainty.
Tony (From the Outside)
From the outside 
Is technology part of the problem? Tech replacements for human work need to be planned and built in advance, are expensive and fiddly to adapt beyond minor adjustments, so perhaps have increased the rigidity of “control” over how we work with/within markets?
LikeLike
Thanks for the feedback.
In terms of Bookstaber’s framework, the technology theme you outline will I guess add to the complexity of the system and possibly to its connectedness. Advances in the communication technology we use to coordinate our activities does make the global supply chain more able to operate on just in time principles The issue there is not so much the rigidity of the system but the fact that it is optimised to be super efficient at the expense of having some built in redundancy that allows greater resilience. This trade off between efficiency and resilience is the part of the puzzle that I find especially interesting.
The other dimension of using tech to replace human workers is that it begs the question have we reached the limits of being able to find new jobs for the displaced people. We have been through this a number of times starting with the reduction of the need for agricultural labour to be replaced by a huge expansion in new types of work that no one could imagine before hand. In optimist view believes that something will happen to create these new jobs in the way it has happen repeatedly in the past. That however seems dangerously close to believing in a predictable pattern being repeated whereas radical uncertainty pops up when the old paradigm (creative destruction is offset by new jobs) fails to work. Maybe we need Keynes’ paradigm in which we all agree that we have enough and just choose to work less while maintaining the infinitely better lifestyle that we have achieved versus his time; i.e no more continuous growth. I have no neat answers I am afraid.
LikeLike