读Geopolitical Alpha（九）——The Time

这一章主要是讲Framework的不足：

The constraint framework has a blind spot: the power of market participants’ collective psychology to run down the clock on constraint-based forecasts.

具体来说，群体心理什么时候会改变？

The predictability of the link weakens when the collective respondsirrationally, en masse, to a single issue. Or when a few Twitteratidominate the discussion by “shouting” over the median voter. Theoutlier becomes the median in those moments of panic. The zeitgeistveers toward the extreme, and suddenly it’s a median voter preferencegone wild. Under these circumstances, the panic has the power to delaymaterial, constraint-based outcomes. As a result, it can shift forecasttime horizons. In this chapter, I examine this limitation of the constraintframework through the lens of the latest cases of mass irrationality:terrorism and the COVID-19 pandemic.

所以，作者说的是恐怖主义以及大流行，就改变了框架中的constraints —— 但是作者为什么将这两者，称之为群体心理呢？为什么不是material constraint？

My next view will probably get me hate mail from 90% ofAmerican readers: I kind of agree with Obama and Trump. Yes, theIslamic State was capable spreading of terror, and no, the virus was nota hoax. Obviously, the statements were objectively wrong. However,both Obama and Trump were correct in their initial assessments thatmaterially, the threats were overblown.

但是，接下来是作者的说法了，群体心理：

They were only wrong because in early 2014 and early 2020, thematerial reality did not matter. What mattered was the perceptionof that reality by the public, and thus the markets, for the foreseeable (forecastable) future. The public lost its mind when confrontedby the rampaging, decapitating Islamic State and the rampaging,octogenarian-targeting COVID-19 pandemic.

重点记录一下后者吧，作者认为the crisis is ultimately manageable，因为：

• COVID-19 targets the elderly: There is a lot that we in March2020 do not know about the virus. But what we do know is thatthe hospitalization and mortality rates are highly concentrated in theelderly portion of the population. The concentration of risk into asingle category opens the door for less economically damaging management strategies. And if those strategies do not emerge, humanbehavior can adjust so that the most vulnerable know to self-isolate. 

• The cost of fear is not constant: Fear is cheap, until it isn’t. Overtime, fear-led behavior will buckle under the rising socioeconomiccosts of maintaining it. The “Unit Cost of Fear” will ultimately rise. 

• The median voter leans left: The US median voter has abandoned laissez-faire policies and moved to the left on the ideologicalspectrum, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 4. As such, the policyresponse to the COVID-19 pandemic will be – and has been – muchlarger and faster than investors anticipate.

所以：

If G20 economies embrace indiscriminate flatten-the-curve policies, particularly if they do so indefinitely, they will cause a depression. Not a 2008-style Great Recession, but a 1930s-style Great Depression.

这带来的后果是：

But a deep recession will potentially kill more people thanCOVID-19, and not just from the well-known recessionary effect ofrising suicides. A 2016 Lancet study posited that an excess of 260,000cancer-related deaths occurred in OECD economies due to the 2008Great Recession.10 That mortality surplus is just from cancer, and justfrom the 2008 Great Recession. What would a depression do?

作者以希腊这样一个样本为例，看横轴：

This was three times higher than that of Western Europe, at a time when worldwide mortality rates were declining.

是不是应该看PIGS几个国家？不管怎样，作者的结论是：

An economic depression is such a massive constraint on policymakers that the trajectory of flatten-the-curve policy will ultimately have to change.