Tag: Radical Uncertainty

“From the Outside” takes stock

This is possibly a bit self indulgent but “From The Outside” is fast approaching the 5th anniversary of its first post so I thought it was time to look back on the ground covered and more importantly what resonated with the people who read what I write.

The blog as originally conceived was intended to explore some big picture questions such as the ways in which banks are different from other companies and the implications this has for thinking about questions like their cost of equity, optimal capital structure, risk appetite, risk culture and the need for prudential regulation. The particular expertise (bias? perspective?) I brought to these questions was that of a bank capital manager, with some experience in the Internal Capital Adequacy Assessment Process (ICAAP) applicable to a large Australian bank and a familiarity with a range of associated issues such as risk measurement (credit, market, operational, interest rate etc), risk appetite, risk culture, funds transfer pricing and economic capital allocation.

Over the close to 5 years that the blog has been operational, something in excess of 200 posts have been published. The readership is pretty limited (196 followers in total) but hopefully that makes you feel special and part of a real in crowd of true believers in the importance of understanding the questions posed above. Page views have continued to grow year on year to reach 9,278 for 2022 with 5,531individual visits.

The most popular post was one titled “Milton Friedman’s doctrine of the social responsibility of business” in which I attempted to summarise Friedman’s famous essay “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits” first published in September 1970. I was of course familiar with Friedman’s doctrine but only second hand via reading what other people said he said and what they thought about their framing of his argument. You can judge for yourself, but my post attempts to simply summarise his doctrine with a minimum of my own commentary. It did not get as much attention but I also did a post flagging what I thought was a reasonably balanced assessment of the pros and cons of Friedman’s argument written by Luigi Zingales.

The second most popular post was one titled “How banks differ from other companies“. This post built on an earlier one titled “Are banks a special kind of company …” which attempted to respond to some of the contra arguments made by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig. Both posts were based around three distinctive features that I argued make banks different and perhaps “special” …

  • The way in which net new lending by banks can create new bank deposits which in turn are treated as a form of money in the financial system (i.e. one of the unique things banks do is create a form of money);
  • The reality that a large bank cannot be allowed to fail in the conventional way (i.e. bankruptcy followed by reorganisation or liquidation) that other companies and even countries can (and frequently do); and
  • The extent to which bank losses seem to follow a power law distribution and what this means for measuring the expected loss of a bank across the credit cycle.

The third most popular post was titled “What does the “economic perspective” add to can ICAAP“ and this to be frank this was a surprise. I honestly thought no one would read it but what do I know. The post was written in response to a report the European Central Bank (ECB) put out in August 2020 on ICAAP practices it had observed amongst the banks it supervised. What I found surprising in the ECB report was what seemed to me to be an over reliance on what economic capital models could contribute to the ICAAP.

It was not the ECB’s expectation that economic capital should play a role that bothered me but more a seeming lack of awareness of the limitations of these models in providing the kinds of insights the ECB was expecting to see more of and a lack of focus on the broader topic of radical uncertainty and how an ICAAP should respond to a world populated by unknown unknowns. It was pleasing that a related post I did on John Kay and Mervyn King’s book “Radical Uncertainty : Decision Making for an Unknowable Future” also figured highly in reader interest.

Over the past year I have strayed from my area of expertise to explore what is happening in the crypto world. None of my posts have achieved wide readership but that is perfectly OK because I am not a crypto expert. I have been fascinated however by the claims that crypto can and will disrupt the traditional banking model. I have attempted to remain open to the possibility that I am missing something but remain sceptical about the more radical claims the crypto true believers assert. There are a lot of fellow sceptics that I read but if I was going to recommend one article that offers a good overview of the crypto story to date it would be the one by Matt Levine published in the 31 October 2022 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek.

I am hoping to return to my bank capital roots in 2023 to explore the latest instalment of what it means for an Australian bank to be “Unquestionably Strong” but I fear that crypto will continue to feature as well.

Thank you to all who find the blog of interest – as always let me know what I missing.

Tony – From the Outside

Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story

Shout out to Tim Harford for this introduction to the study of how, in his words, ignorance can be deliberately produced. The technical term “agnatology” is I suspect unlikely to catch on but the underlying message is one worth understanding. At a minimum it is a handy addition to your Scrabble dictionary.

The article was originally published in March 2017 but I only came across it recently via this podcast interview Harford did with Cardiff Garcia on “The New Bazaar”. The context in 2017 was the successful campaign for the US presidency that Donald Trump ran during 2016 with a bit of Brexit thrown in but this is a challenge that is not going away anytime soon.

Harford notes that it is tempting to think that the answer to the challenge posed by what has come to be known as a post truth society lies in a better process to establish the facts

The instinctive reaction from those of us who still care about the truth — journalists, academics and many ordinary citizens — has been to double down on the facts.

He affirms the need to have some agreement on how we distinguish facts from opinions and assertions but he cautions that this is unlikely to solve the problem. He cites the tobacco industry response to the early evidence that smoking causes cancer to illustrate why facts alone are not enough.

A good place to start is by delving into why facts alone are not enough – a few extracts from the article hopefully capture the main lessons

Doubt is usually not hard to produce, and facts alone aren’t enough to dispel it. We should have learnt this lesson already; now we’re going to have to learn it all over again…

Tempting as it is to fight lies with facts, there are three problems with that strategy…

The first is that a simple untruth can beat off a complicated set of facts simply by being easier to understand and remember. When doubt prevails, people will often end up believing whatever sticks in the mind…

There’s a second reason why facts don’t seem to have the traction that one might hope. Facts can be boring. The world is full of things to pay attention to, from reality TV to your argumentative children, from a friend’s Instagram to a tax bill. Why bother with anything so tedious as facts?…

In the war of ideas, boredom and distraction are powerful weapons.
The endgame of these distractions is that matters of vital importance become too boring to bother reporting…

There’s a final problem with trying to persuade people by giving them facts: the truth can feel threatening, and threatening people tends to backfire. “People respond in the opposite direction,” says Jason Reifler, a political scientist at Exeter University. This “backfire effect” is now the focus of several researchers, including Reifler and his colleague Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth…

The problem here is that while we like to think of ourselves as rational beings, our rationality didn’t just evolve to solve practical problems, such as building an elephant trap, but to navigate social situations. We need to keep others on our side. Practical reasoning is often less about figuring out what’s true, and more about staying in the right tribe…

We see what we want to see — and we reject the facts that threaten our sense of who we are…

When we reach the conclusion that we want to reach, we’re engaging in “motivated reasoning”…

Even in a debate polluted by motivated reasoning, one might expect that facts will help. Not necessarily: when we hear facts that challenge us, we selectively amplify what suits us, ignore what does not, and reinterpret whatever we can. More facts mean more grist to the motivated reasoning mill. The French dramatist Molière once wrote: “A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.” Modern social science agrees…

When people are seeking the truth, facts help. But when people are selectively reasoning about their political identity, the facts can backfire.

So what are we to do?

Harford cites a study that explores the value of scientific curiosity

What Kahan and his colleagues found, to their surprise, was that while politically motivated reasoning trumps scientific knowledge, “politically motivated reasoning . . . appears to be negated by science curiosity”. Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not. Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not. The researchers muse that curious people have an extra reason to seek out the facts: “To experience the pleasure of contemplating surprising insights into how the world works.”

It is of course entirely possible that Tim Harford’s assessment is just calling to my own bias. I will admit that one the things that I always looked for when hiring, or working, with people was curiosity. These people are surprisingly rare but (IMHO) worth their weight in gold. An intellectually curious mind makes up for a lot of other areas where the person might not be perfect in terms of skills or experience. The general point (I think) also ties to the often cited problem that people with lots of knowledge can sometimes be prone to not being so street smart. Nassim Taleb makes this argument in nearly everything he writes.

So Tim Harford might not be offering the entire answer but I think his article is worth reading on two counts

  • Firstly as a cautionary tale against expecting that all debates and disputes can be resolved by simply establishing the “facts”
  • Secondly as a reminder of the power of a curious mind and the value of the never-ending search for “what am I missing?”

Let me know what I am missing

Tony – From the Outside

What Can We Learn from a Big Boat Stuck in a Canal?

Interesting post by Matt Stoller on the broader policy issues associated with the current problem in the Sues Canal.

Here is a short extract capturing the main idea …

“Industrial crashes, in other words, are happening in unpredictable ways throughout the economy, shutting down important production systems in semi-random fashion. Such collapses were relatively rare prior to the 1990s. But industrial crashes were built into the nature of our post-1990s production system, which prioritizes efficiency over resiliency. Just as ships like the Ever Given are bigger and more efficient, they are also far riskier. And this tolerance for risk is a pattern reproducing itself far beyond the shipping industry; we’ve off shored production and then consolidated that production in lots of industries, like semiconductors, pharmaceutical precursors, vitamin C, and even book printing.

What is new isn’t the vulnerability of the Suez Canal as a chokepoint, it’s that we’ve intentionally created lots of other artificial chokepoints. And since our production systems have little fat, these systems are tightly coupled, meaning a shortage in one area cascades throughout the global economy, costing us time, money, and lives.”

Irrespective of whether you agree with the solutions he proposes, I think the point he makes (i.e. the tension between efficiency and resilience and the systemic problem with systems that are “tightly coupled”) is a very real issue. We saw this play out in the financial system in 2008 and we saw it play out in global supply chains in 2020. There are differing views on whether the measures have gone far enough but the financial system has been substantially re-engineered to make it more resilient. It remains to be seen how global supply chains will evolve in response to the problems experienced.

Link to the post here

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/what-we-can-learn-from-a-big-boat

Tony – From the Outside

In Search of a Post-Pandemic Modeling Paradigm – Risk Weighted

Nice post from Tony Hughes discussing the difference between modelling intended to forecast a most likely outcome and modelling tail risk …

“A forecasting mindset yields very tight models, whereas a tail risk mindset demands a far more liberal approach to model specification.”

— Read on riskweighted.com/2021/03/03/in-search-of-a-post-pandemic-modeling-paradigm/

What does the “economic perspective” add to an ICAAP?

… is the question I reflected on as I read the ECB Report on Banks’ ICAAP Practices (August 2020).

That I should be asking the question is even more curious given the years I spent working with economic capital but there was something in the ECB position that I was not comfortable with. There is nothing particularly wrong in the ways that the ECB envisages that an economic perspective can add value to a bank’s ICAAP. The problem (for me), I came to realise, is more the lack of emphasis on recognising the fundamental limitations of economic models. In short, my concern is that the detailed focus on risk potentially comes at the expense of an equally useful consideration of the ways in which a bank is subject to radical uncertainty.

The rest of this post offers an overview of what the ECB survey observed and some thoughts on the value of explicitly incorporating radical uncertainty into an ICAAP.

The ECB report sample set

The ECB report, based on a survey of 37 significant institutions it supervises, assesses the extent to which these organisations were complying (as at April 2019) with ECB expectations for how the ICAAP should be constructed and executed. The selected sample focuses on the larger (and presumably more sophisticated) banks, including all global systematically important banks supervised by the ECB. I am straying outside my area of expertise (Australian bank capital management) in this post but there is always something to learn from considering another perspective.

The ECB assessment on ICAAP practices

The ECB notes that progress has been made in some areas of the ICAAP. In particular; all banks in the survey have risk identification processes in place, they produce summary documents (“Capital Adequacy Statements” in ECB parlance) that enable bank management (not just the technical specialists) to engage with and take responsibility for the capital strength of their bank and the sample banks do incorporate stress testing into their capital planning process.

The ECB believes however that there is still a lot of room for improvement. The general area of concern is that the banks it supervises are still not paying sufficient attention to the question of business continuity. The ECB cites three key areas as being particularly in need of improvement if the ICAAPs are to play their assigned role in effectively contributing to a bank’s continuity:

  1. Data quality
  2. The application of the “Economic Perspective” in the ICAAP
  3. Stress testing

The value of building the ICAAP on sound data and testing the outcomes of the process under a variety of severe stress scenarios is I think uncontentious.

The value the economic perspective contributes is less black and white. Like many thing in life, the challenge is to get the balance right. My perspective is that economic models are quite useful but they are far from a complete answer and dangerous when they create an illusion of knowledge, certainty and control.

The economic internal perspective

The ECB’s guide to the ICAAP defines the term “economic internal perspective” as follows:

“Under this perspective, the institution’s assessment is expected to cover the full universe of risks that may have a material impact on its capital position from an economic perspective. In order to capture the undisguised economic situation, this perspective is not based on accounting or regulatory provisions. Rather, it should take into account economic value considerations for all economically relevant aspects, including assets, liabilities and risks. …. The institution is expected to manage economic risks and assess them as part of its stress-testing framework and its monitoring and management of capital adequacy”

ECB Guide to the internal capital adequacy assessment process (ICAAP) – Principles, November 2018 (Paragraph 49 / pages 18-19)

So far so good – the key points seem (to me) to be quite fair as statements of principle.

The ECB sees value in looking beyond the accounting and regulatory measures that drive the reported capital ratios (the “normative perspective” in ECB terminology) and wants banks to consider “the full universe of risks that may have a material impact on its capital position”. The ECB Report also emphasises the importance of thinking about capital from a “business continuity” perspective and cites the “… unjustified inclusions of certain capital components (e.g. minority interests, Additional Tier 1 … or Tier 2 … instruments) … which can inflate the internal capital figures” as evidence of banks failing to meet this expectation. Again a fair point in my view.

These are all worthy objectives but I wonder

  • firstly about the capacity of economic capital models to reliably deliver the kinds of insights the ECB expects and
  • secondly whether there are more cost effective ways to achieve similar outcomes.

The value of a different perspective

As a statement of principle, the value of bringing a different perspective to bear clearly has value. The examples that the ECB cites for ways in which the economic perspective can inform and enhance the normative perspective are all perfectly valid and potentially useful. My concern is that the ECB seems to be pursuing an ideal state in which an ICAAP can, with sufficient commitment and resources, achieve a degree of knowledge that enables a bank to control its future.

Business continuity is ultimately founded on a recognition that there are limits to what we can know about the future and I side with the risk philosophy that no amount of analysis will fundamentally change this.

The ECB’s economic perspective does not neccesarily capture radical uncertainty

I have touched on the general topic of uncertainty and what it means for the ICAAP a couple of times in this blog. The ECB report mentions “uncertainty” twice; once in the context of assessing climate change risk

Given the uncertainty surrounding the timing of climate change and its negative consequences, as well as the potentially far-reaching impact in breadth and magnitude along several transmission channels via which climate-related risks may impact banks’ capital adequacy, it is rather concerning that almost one-third of the banks has not even considered these risks in their risk identification processes at all.

Page 39

… and then in the context of making allowances for data quality

However, … in an internal deep dive on risk quantification in 2019, half of the risk quantifications showed material deficiencies. This finding is exacerbated by the data quality issues generally observed and moreover by the fact that one-half of the banks does not systematically ensure that the uncertainty surrounding the accuracy of risk quantifications (model risk) is appropriately addressed by an increased level of conservatism. 

Page 54

This is not a question of whether we should expect that banks can demonstrate that they are thinking about climate change and making allowances for model risk along with a host of other plausible sources of adverse outcomes. It is a surprise that any relatively large and sophisticated banks might be found wanting in the ways in which these risks are being assessed and the ECB is right to call that out.

However, it is equally surprising (for me at least) that the ECB did not seem to see value in systematically exploring the extent to which the ICAAPs of the banks it supervises deal with the potential for radical uncertainty.

Business continuity is far more likely if banks can also demonstrate that they recognise the limits of what they can know about the future and actively plan to deal with being surprised by the unexpected. In short one of the key ICAAP practices I would be looking for is evidence that banks have explicitly made allowances for the potential for their capital plan to have to navigate and absorb “unknown unknowns”.

For what it is worth, my template for how a bank might make explicit allowances in the ICAAP for unknown unknowns is included in this post on the construction of calibration of cyclical capital buffers. My posts on the broader issue of risk versus uncertainty can be found on the following links:

Feel free to let me know what I am missing …

Tony – From the Outside

Navigating a radically uncertain world

The distinction between risk and uncertainty is a long running area of interest for me so I have enjoyed reading John Kay and Mervyn King’s book “Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future”. My initial post on the book offered an overview of the content and a subsequent post explored Kay and King’s analysis of why the world is prone to radical uncertainty.

This post looks at how Kay and King propose that we navigate a world that is prone to radical uncertainty. Kay and King start (Ch 8) with the question of what it means to make rational choices.

No surprises that the answer from their perspective is not the pursuit of maximum expected value based on a priori assumptions of what is rational in a world ruled by probability (“axiomatic reasoning”). They concede that there are some problems that can be solved this way. Games of chance where you get repeated opportunities to play the odds is one, but Kay and King are firmly in the camp that the real world is, for the most part, too complex and unknowable to rely on this approach for the big issues.

It is not just that these models do not offer any useful insight into these bigger world choices. They argue, convincingly I think, that these types of precise quantitative models can also tend to create an illusion of knowledge and control that can render the systems we are seeking to understand and manage even more fragile and more prone to uncertainty. An obvious example of this risk is the way in which the advanced measures of bank capital requirements introduced under Basel II tended to encourage banks to take (and bank supervisors to approve) more leverage.

Their argument broadly makes sense to me but there was nothing particularly new or noteworthy in this part of the book. It goes over familiar ground covered equally well by other writers – see for example these posts Epsilon Theory, Bank Underground, Paul Wilmott and David Orrell, Andrew Haldane which discuss contributions these authors have made to the debate.

However, there were two things I found especially interesting in their analysis.

  • One was the argument that the “biases” catalogued by behavioural finance were not necessarily irrational when applied to a radically uncertain world.
  • The other was the emphasis they place on the idea of employing abductive reasoning and reference narratives to help navigate this radically uncertain future.

Behavioural Finance

Kay and King argue that some of the behaviours that behavioural finance deems to be irrational or biased might be better interpreted as sensible rules of thumbs that people have developed to deal with an uncertain world. They are particularly critical of the way behavioural finance is used to justify “nudging” people to what behavioural finance deems to be rational.

Behavioural economics has contributed to our understanding of decision-making in business, finance and government by introducing observation of how people actually behave. But, like the proselytisers for the universal application of probabilistic reasoning, practitioners and admirers of behavioural economics have made claims far more extensive than could be justified by their findings…

…. a philosophy of nudging carries the risk that nudgers claim to know more about an uncertain world than they and their nudgees do or could know.

I struggled with this part of the book because I have generally found behavioural finance insights quite useful for understanding what is going on. The book reads at times like behavioural finance as a whole was a wrong turn but I think the quote above clarifies that they do see value in it provided the proponents don’t push the arguments too far. In particular they are arguing that rules of thumb that have been tested and developed over time deserve greater respect.

Abductive Reasoning and Reference Narratives

The part of Kay and King’s book I found most interesting was their argument that “abductive reasoning” and “reference narratives” are a useful way of mapping our understanding of what is going on and helping us make the right choices to navigate a world prone to enter the domain of radical uncertainty.

If we go back to first principles it could be argued that the test of rationality is that the decisions we make are based on reasonable beliefs about the world and internal consistency. The problem, Kay and King argue, is that this approach still does not address the fundamental question of whether we can ever really understand a radically uncertain world. The truely rational approach to decision making has to be resilient to the fact that our future is shaped by external events taking paths that we have no way of predicting.

The rational answer for Kay and King lies in an “abductive” approach to reasoning. I must confess that I had to look this up (and my spell checker still struggles with it) but it turns out that this is a style of reasoning that works with the available (not to mention often incomplete and ambiguous) information to form educated guesses that seek to explain what we are seeing.

Abduction is similar to induction in that it starts with observations. Where it differs is what the abductive process does with the evidence. Induction seeks to derive general or universal principles from the evidence. Abduction in contrast is context specific. It looks at the evidence and tries to fit “an explanation” of what is going on while being careful to avoid treating it as “the explanation” of what is going on.

Deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning each have a role to play in understanding the world, and as we move to larger worlds the role of the inductive and abductive increases relative to the deductive. And when events are essentially one-of-a-kind, which is often the case in the world of radical uncertainty, abductive reasoning is indispensable.

Reference Narratives

If I have understood their argument correctly, the explanations or hypotheses generated by this abductive style of reasoning are expressed in “reference narratives” which we use to explain to ourselves and others what we are observing. These high level reference narratives can then provide a basis for longer term planning and a framework for day-to-day choices.

Deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning each have a role to play in understanding the world, and as we move to larger worlds the role of the inductive and abductive increases relative to the deductive. And when events are essentially one-of-a-kind, which is often the case in the world of radical uncertainty, abductive reasoning is indispensable.

Kay and King acknowledge that this approach is far from foolproof and devote a considerable part of their book to what distinguishes good narratives from bad and how to avoid the narrative being corrupted by groupthink.

Good and Bad Reference Narratives

Kay and King argue that credibility is a core feature distinguishing good and bad narratives. A good narrative offers a coherent and internally consistent explanation but it also needs to avoid over-reach. A warning sign for a bad narrative is one that seeks to explain everything. This is especially important given that our species seems to be irresistibly drawn to grand narratives – the simpler the better.

Our need for narratives is so strong that many people experience a need for an overarching narrative–some unifying explanatory theme or group of related themes with very general applicability. These grand narratives may help them believe that complexity can be managed, that there exists some story which describes ‘the world as it really is’. Every new experience or piece of information can be interpreted in the light of that overarching narrative.

Kay and King use the fox and the hedgehog analogy to illustrate their arguement that we should always be sceptical of the capacity of any one narrative to explain everything,

…. The hedgehog knows one big thing, the fox many little things. The hedgehog subscribes to some overarching narrative; the fox is sceptical about the power of any overarching narrative. The hedgehog approaches most uncertainties with strong priors; the fox attempts to assemble evidence before forming a view of ‘what is going on here’.

Using Reference Narratives

Kay and King cite the use of scenario based planing as an example of using a reference narrative to explore exposure to radical uncertainty and build resilience but they caution against trying too hard to assign probabilities to scenarios. This I think is a point well made and something that I have covered in other posts (see here and here).

Scenarios are useful ways of beginning to come to terms with an uncertain future. But to ascribe a probability to any particular scenario is misconceived…..

Scenario planning is a way of ordering thoughts about the future, not of predicting it.

The purpose is … to provide a comprehensive framework for setting out the issues with which any business must deal: identifying markets, meeting competition, hiring people, premises and equipment. Even though the business plan is mostly numbers–many people will describe the spreadsheet as a model–it is best thought of as a narrative. The exercise of preparing the plan forces the author to translate a vision into words and numbers in order to tell a coherent and credible story.

Kay and King argue that reference narratives are a way of bringing structure and conviction to the judgment, instinct and emotion that people bring to making decisions about an uncertain future

We make decisions using judgement, instinct and emotions. And when we explain the decisions we have made, either to ourselves or to others, our explanation usually takes narrative form. As David Tuckett, a social scientist and psychoanalyst, has argued, decisions require us ‘to feel sufficiently convinced about the anticipated outcomes to act’. Narratives are the mechanism by which conviction is developed. Narratives underpin our sense of identity, and enable us to recreate decisions of the past and imagine decisions we will face in the future.

Given the importance they assign to narratives, Kay and King similarly emphasise the importance of having a good process for challenging the narrative and avoiding groupthink.

‘Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here. Then, I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until the next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement, and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.’

Alfred P. Sloan (Long time president chairman and CEO of General Motors Corporation) quoted in the introduction to Ch 16: Challenging Narratives

These extracts from their book nicely captures the essence of their argument

Knowledge does not advance through a mechanical process of revising the probabilities people attach to a known list of possible future outcomes as they watch for the twitches on the Bayesian dial. Instead, current conventional wisdom is embodied in a collective narrative which changes in response to debate and challenge. Mostly, the narrative changes incrementally, as the prevalent account of ‘what is going on here’ becomes more complete. Sometimes, the narrative changes discontinuously – the process of paradigm shift described by the American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn.

the mark of the first-rate decision-maker confronted by radical uncertainty is to organise action around a reference narrative while still being open to both the possibility that this narrative is false and that alternative narratives might be relevant. This is a very different style of reasoning from Bayesian updating.

Kay and King argue that the aim in challenging the reference narrative is not simply to find the best possible explanation of what is going on. That in a sense is an almost impossible task given the premise that the world is inherently unpredictable. The objective is to find a narrative that seems to offer a useful guide to what is going on but not hold too tightly to it. The challenge process also tests the weaknesses of plans of action based on the reference narrative and, in doing so, progressively secures greater robustness and resilience.


The quote below repeats a point covered above but it does nicely capture their argument that the pursuit of quantitative precision can be a distraction from the broader objective of having a robust and resilient process. By all means be as rigorous and precise as possible but recognise the risk that the probabilities you assign to scenarios and “risks” may end up simply serving to disguise inherent uncertainties that cannot be managed by measurement.

The attempt to construct probabilities is a distraction from the more useful task of trying to produce a robust and resilient defence capability to deal with many contingencies, few of which can be described in any but the sketchiest of detail.

robustness and resilience, not the assignment of arbitrary probabilities to a more or less infinite list of possible contingencies, are the key characteristics of a considered military response to radical uncertainty. And we believe the same is true of strategy formulation in business and finance, for companies and households.

Summing Up

Overall a thought provoking book. I am not yet sure that I am ready to embrace all of their proposed solutions. In particular, I am not entirely comfortable with the criticisms they make of risk maps, bayesian decision models and behavioural finance. That said, I do think they are starting with the right questions and the reference narrative approach is something that I plan to explore in more depth.

I had not thought of it this way previously but the objective of being “Unquestionably Strong” that was recommended by the 2014 Australian Financial System Inquiry and subsequently fleshed out by APRA can be interpreted as an example of a reference narrative that has guided the capital management strategies of the Australian banks.

Tony – From The Outside

Why we fail to prepare for disasters

Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) offers a short and readable account here of some of the reasons why, faced with clear risks, we still fail to act. We can see the problem, typically one of many, but don’t do enough to manage or mitigate the risk. New Orleans’ experiences with severe weather events features prominently as does (not surprisingly) COVID 19.

This, then, is why you and I did not see this coming: we couldn’t grasp the scale of the threat; we took complacent cues from each other, rather than digesting the logic of the reports from China and Italy; we retained a sunny optimism that no matter how bad things got, we personally would escape harm; we could not grasp what an exponentially growing epidemic really means; and our wishful thinking pushed us to look for reasons to ignore the danger.

Why we fail to prepare for disasters; Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist)

Another big part of the problem is that the cost of being fully prepared can be more than we are willing to pay. Especially when there is continuous pressure to find cost economies in the here and now

Serious scenarios are useful, but … no use if they are not taken seriously. That means spending money on research that may never pay off, or on emergency capacity that may never be used. It is not easy to justify such investments with the day-to-day logic of efficiency.

So the key points I took from his post:

  • Sometimes it can be something genuinely new and unexpected (i.e. Black Swan events) but risks we are well aware of can be equally damaging
  • Part of the problem is that we are social animals and take our cues from what the rest of the herd is doing (“normalcy bias” or “negative panic”)
  • Even where we understand the statistics and know that someone will be impacted, we tend to assume it will be someone else or someone else’s family (“optimism bias”)
  • We are especially bad at understanding risks that have an exponential driver (“exponential myopia”)
  • We are also quite good at finding reasons to justify ignoring risks we want to ignore or otherwise find inconvenient (“wishful thinking”)
  • Last, but far from least, efficiency is the enemy of resilience.

We need to remember that most of the factors listed above can also be useful in many other contexts (arguably most of the time). A tendency not to panic can be pretty useful and optimism has helped dreamers and ordinary people achieve many great things that have benefited the herd. Efficiency as a rule seems like a good thing to strive for.

Harford does not offer any easy answers but his post touches on issues that I have also been considering in Kay and King’s book titled “Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future”. I have done a couple of posts on that book already (here and here) and am working on a final one that focuses on Chapters 8-16 which set out their ideas for how we navigate a world prone to radical uncertainty.

Tony – From the Outside

The why of Radical Uncertainty

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.
“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.“

Bookstaber, Chapter 2: Being Human

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)

Worth reading – “Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future” by John Kay and Mervyn King

I have covered some of the ideas in the book in previous posts (here and here) but have now had the chance the read the book in full and can recommend it. I have included more detailed notes on the book here but this post offers a short introduction to some of the key ideas.

Kay and King cover a lot of ground but, simply put, their book is about

“… how real people make choices in a radically uncertain world, in which probabilities cannot meaningfully be attached to alternative futures.” 

One of the things that makes the book interesting is that they were once true believers in decision making models based on rational economic agents seeking to maximise or optimise expected value.

As students and academics we pursued the traditional approach of trying to understand economic behaviour through the assumption that households, businesses, and indeed governments take actions in order to optimise outcomes. We learnt to approach economic problems by asking what rational individuals were maximising. Businesses were maximising shareholder value, policy-makers were trying to maximise social welfare, and households were maximising their happiness or ‘utility’. And if businesses were not maximising shareholder value, we inferred that they must be maximising something else – their growth, or the remuneration of their senior executives.

The limits on their ability to optimise were represented by constraints: the relationship between inputs and outputs in the case of businesses, the feasibility of different policies in the case of governments, and budget constraints in the case of households. This ‘optimising’ description of behaviour was well suited to the growing use of mathematical techniques in the social sciences. If the problems facing businesses, governments and families could be expressed in terms of well-defined models, then behaviour could be predicted by evaluating the ‘optimal’ solution to those problems.

Kay and King are not saying that these models are useless. They continue to see some value in the utility maximisation model but have come to believe that it is not the complete answer that many economists, finance academics and politicians came to believe.

Although much can be learnt by thinking in this way, our own practical experience was that none of these economic actors were trying to maximise anything at all. This was not because they were stupid, although sometimes they were, nor because they were irrational, although sometimes they were. It was because an injunction to maximise shareholder value, or social welfare, or household utility, is not a coherent guide to action.

They argue that the approach works up to a point but fails to deal with decisions that are in the domain of radical uncertainty

But we show in this book that the axiomatic approach to the definition of rationality comprehensively fails when applied to decisions made by businesses, governments or households about an uncertain future. And this failure is not because these economic actors are irrational, but because they are rational, and – mostly – do not pretend to knowledge they do not and could not have. Frequently they do not know what is going to happen and cannot successfully describe the range of things that might happen, far less know the relative likelihood of a variety of different possible events.

There are many factors that explain the current state of affairs but a key inflexion point in Kay and King’s account can be found in what they label “A Forgotten Dispute” (Chapter 5) between Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes on one side and Frank Ramsey and Bruno de Frinetti on the other, regarding the distinction between risk and uncertainty. Knight and Keynes argued that probability is an objective concept confined to problems with a defined and knowable frequency distribution. Ramsey argued that “subjective probability” is equally valid and used the mathematics developed for the analysis of frequency based probabilities to apply these subjective probabilities.

“Economists (used to) distinguish risk, by which they meant unknowns which could be described with probabilities, from uncertainty, which could not….. over the last century economists have attempted to elide that historic distinction between risk and uncertainty, and to apply probabilities to every instance of our imperfect knowledge of the future.”

Keynes and Knight lost the debate

Ramsey and de Finetti won, and Keynes and Knight lost, that historic battle of ideas over the nature of uncertainty. The result was that the concept of radical uncertainty virtually disappeared from the mainstream of economics for more than half a century. The use of subjective probabilities, and the associated mathematics, seemed to turn the mysteries of radical uncertainty into puzzles with calculable solutions. 

Ramsey and de Finetti laid the foundations for economists to expand the application of probability based thinking and decision making. Milton Friedman picked up the baton and ran with it.

There is a lot more to the book than interesting historical anecdotes on the history of economic ideas. The subject matter is rich and it crosses over topics covered previously in this blog including:

There are also overlaps with a book by Richard Bookstaber titled “The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction”. I am yet to review this book but have some detailed notes here.

One quibble with the book is that I think their critique of the Bayesian method is a bit harsh. I understand their concern to push back on the idea that Bayes solves the problem of using probability to understand uncertainty. At times however it reads like Bayes has no value at all. Read “The Theory that Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy” by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne for an alternative perspective.

Bayes may not help with mysteries but its application in puzzles should not be undervalued. I don’t entirely agree with their perspective on behavioural finance either.

I want to come back to the topics of risk and uncertainty in a future post but it will take time to process all of the overlapping pieces. In the interim, I hope you found the overview above useful.

Tony (From the Outside)

Possible pitfalls of a 1-in-X approach to financial stability – Bank Underground

Bank Underground is a blog for Bank of England staff to share views that challenge – or support – prevailing policy orthodoxies. The views expressed are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Bank of England, or its policy committees. Posting on this blog, Adam Brinley Codd and Andrew Gimber argue that false confidence in people’s ability to calculate probabilities of rare events might end up worsening the crises regulators are trying to prevent.

The post concludes with their personal observations about how best to deal with this meta-uncertainty.

Policymakers could avoid talking about probabilities altogether. Instead of a 1-in-X event, the Bank of England’s Annual Cyclical Scenario is described as a “coherent ‘tail risk’ scenario”.

Policymakers could avoid some of the cognitive biases that afflict people’s thinking about low-probability events, by rephrasing low-probability events in terms of less extreme numbers. A “100-year” flood has a 1% chance of happening in any given year, but anyone who lives into their 70s is more likely than not to see one in their lifetime.

Policymakers could  be vocal about the fact that there are worse outcomes beyond the 1-in-X point of the distribution.

— Read on bankunderground.co.uk/2020/02/06/possible-pitfalls-of-a-1-in-x-approach-to-financial-stability/