The price of everything

When satire dies

“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others ?”

• Voltaire, Candide.

2020 to date has been no laughing matter. For roughly 52% of the audience of alleged comedian Marcus Brigstocke, the years 2016 to 2020 have hardly been a laugh riot either. Unfunny woke comedian Brigstocke, long a fixture of the BBC “comedy” schedule, was one of the first to report to the media that his stridently anti-Brexit “humour” wasn’t working. It turns out that roughly half of audiences outside the London metropolitan bubble resent paying to be insulted by a “comedian” whose views they simply don’t share. Now, however, there are early signs of a rapprochement between Remainers and Leavers, if the latest edition of Geoff Norcott’s excellent What Most People Think podcast (parental advisory rating for some occasional fruity language) is any guide. Brigstocke is a guest on this week’s edition.

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Ever Get The Feeling You’ve Been Cheated ?

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

• Philip K. Dick.

In his book Sapiens, the historian Yuval Noah Harari posits the provocative theory that a crucial factor behind mankind’s evolutionary advantage over our ancient predecessors and biological competitors has been our capacity for, and appreciation of, the power of narrative. The thinking goes as follows. A small village of perhaps 100 people has no need of external administration. It organises itself. But a country of perhaps 70 million people requires some form of exogenous coordination, if only to provide those services that the free enterprise system cannot or will not provide itself (street lights and armies, for example). In extremis, the country has to provide a cohort of young men – it will be, invariably, men – willing to fight and, if need be, die in defence of said country. How does it achieve this ? By telling stories. National myths.

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Big Deal

“So not a deal of Rooseveltian ambition ? Perhaps not. As both the FT and union boss Len McCluskey acidly observed, Roosevelt’s New Deal spawned mega projects such as the Hoover Dam; [Boris] Johnson’s list includes the reannouncement of repairs to a bridge in Sandwell.”

• Simon Wilson on ‘Boris Johnson’s New Deal’ in MoneyWeek, 10^th July 2020.

There is a pivotal sequence in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Having been herded into an army helicopter near Wyoming’s Devils Tower with a number of other seeming eccentrics, electrical maintenance worker Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) suddenly twigs that the cover story they have all been fed by the government – an accidental toxic nerve gas spill – is just that, a cover story. He takes off his gas mask and encourages his fellow masked passengers to escape. While they stare wide-eyed in horror, he gratefully gulps in lungfuls of oxygen and tells them,

There is nothing wrong with the air !

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A four-letter word

“Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”

• Carl Richards.

What is risk ? James Ball in his piece ‘Anatomy of a fiasco: how Britain’s pandemic defences failed’ for The Spectator offers, essentially, one currently relevant practical example:

In October, a panel of 21 experts from across the world gathered for the first of what promised to be a series of reports assessing readiness for pandemics. ‘Infectious diseases know no borders,’ warned the Global Health Security Index. ‘So all countries must prioritise and exercise the capabilities required to prevent, detect and rapidly respond to public health emergencies.’ Every country was called to be transparent about its capabilities ‘to assure neighbours it can stop an outbreak from becoming an international catastrophe’. Two countries were held up as the best examples: Britain and the United States.

If a league table were drawn up of countries that most failed to contain Covid deaths, the US and the UK would be pretty near the top. Yet both spent huge amounts of money on their pandemic preparedness and flattered themselves that their experts had built the strongest defence. The UK was ranked best in the world for its ability to stage ‘rapid response to and mitigation of the spread of an epidemic’. It was given 92 points out of 100. Six weeks later, the first Covid-19 case was recorded in China and the real test began.

That is to say, one instance of risk is a wildly inflated and wholly unjustified sense of overconfidence. Overconfidence is not exactly unheard of in fund management circles either.

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