Coronavirus: Five world-shaking events of the last thirty years - what do these have to do with the black swan?
August 16, 1991 The Soviet Union was still the largest state in the world, with empires spanning 11 time zones in Europe and Asia. After four months, there will be no sign of this state in the world, if anyone tried to say it that day, no one would believe it.
Or let's go back to September 10, 2001. The next day, the twin towers of New York will be blown up by a passenger jet, the attack will continue on the Pentagon, and the West, including the United States, will be embroiled in a huge war for decades - a future that even the toughest security or intelligence expert could have predicted.
The same can be said of what happened on December 16, 2010 in Sidi Buzid, Tunisia. A young fruit seller, a victim of police harassment, set himself on fire by pouring petrol on himself in the street in front of the city governor's office. Not only did Mohammed Bouazizi lose his life in that fire, but the Arab Spring, which began with it, has turned the Arab world upside down. But on that day in 2010, no one could predict what would happen in the Middle East for the next ten years.
There are more such big events in the last thirty years. Such as the 2008 financial crisis. Due to which the recession in the world economy started.
The latest addition to this list is the coronavirus epidemic. Which is now causing upheaval all over the world.
Such phenomena are now described as 'black swans'. But where is the relationship between the black swan and the world?
Black swan theory
Nasim Nicholas Taleb is the father of the 'Black Swan' theory. He has worked in the capital market for many years. But later he changed his profession and moved to the academic world. His book, The Black Swan: was published in 2006.
The year after the book was published, the world banking system collapsed. This theory has been discussed since then.
In his book, Nasim Nicholas Taleb explains why he uses the metaphor of a black swan to describe such events.
Until the discovery of Australia, people thought the swan meant the white swan. Because nowhere in the world has anyone seen a black swan before. So man knows from his observation and real experience that there is no such thing as a black swan.
But when the first black swan was seen in Australia, it was a huge shock for ornithologists.
Nasim Nicholas Taleb has tried to illustrate through this example that there is a limitation to our observational and empirical knowledge and that this knowledge is very fragile. The knowledge experienced by man for thousands of years has been falsified in an instant when the first black swan was actually seen. Black swan means that which we do not know or which was beyond our experience of knowing, but which actually exists or may happen.
Originally from this example came the theory of the 'Black Swan Event'.
Simply put, those events are described as 'black swans'
What happens is very sudden, without any prediction. Absolutely un-predictable.
The magnitude and horror of these events shook the whole world.Initiates important turning points in world history and the impact of these events is far-reaching.
According to Nasim Nicholas Taleb, after the incident, experts tried to explain that it was inevitable. But this knowledge of theirs is actually obtained from the subsequent perception of the event, acquired from the experience of the event. In English it is called 'in handsite.'
These features are evident in the case of the five biggest Black Swan events in the last thirty years. When these events happened, no one could have imagined that such a dramatic event could happen before, so there was a preparation to deal with the event as it was not predicted.
The collapse of the Soviet Union
August 19, 1991 At three minutes past seven in the morning, an emergency phone call came to the US embassy in Moscow. Political Officer Ed Salazar called Ambassador James F. Collins.
He asked the ambassador, "Have you heard the news on the radio?" The radio reported that Mikhail Gorbachev had stepped down as president of the Soviet Union, and that Gennady Yanayev had taken over as the new president. Gorbachev has been sent into exile in a Crimean garden house.
It was a coup attempt to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from power in the Soviet Union. The Americans knew that Gorbachev was under pressure from the Communist Party's hardliners because of his reform program. But it was unimaginable that the Soviet Union would disintegrate in just a few months as a result of this failed coup attempt.
Ambassador James Collins later said that what happened in the next three days from August 19 was so dramatic and unimaginable that it changed the face of the entire Soviet state system. Because in those three days, the Communist Party lost control of the Soviet state. When Mikhail Gorbachev returned to Moscow, he was no longer the General Secretary of the Communist Party, but still the President of the Soviet Union.
Its subsequent history is more dramatic. Boris Yeltsin emerged as the most powerful politician in Russia after the coup attempt failed. The fate of the Soviet Empire was decided in December. Sitting on a farm in Belarus, the leaders of the Soviet republics sat down for a dinner and finalized how the country would be torn apart. The flag of the Soviet Union was hoisted over the Kremlin for the last time on December 25, and the country disappeared from the world map on December 26.
In the words of Ambassador James Collins, "Honestly, no one in the US government could have imagined what happened in the Soviet Union that August."
With such a powerful intelligence agency as the CIA, the question arose as to why the United States or the rest of the world did not realize that the Soviet Union would collapse from within and why it could not prepare for it. No good answer was found.
When one of the two superpowers collapsed like a house of cards, the other superpower, the United States, became so unprepared that serious concerns were raised about the world's balance of power, security, and the security of the Soviet Union's vast nuclear arsenal. But for decades, the United States has made every effort to destroy the Soviet communist system.
The destruction of the Berlin Wall, a country in Eastern Europe, was a matter of time after the collapse of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, some tried to say. But the rapid and dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union in just a few months was unimaginable.
It was the most dramatic 'Black Swan' event since World War II. Not only the geopolitical map of the whole world, this incident changed a lot.
Nine Eleven: The Fight Against Terrorism
If there is one moment in recent world history that has made a clear intersection between the previous era and the next era, it is - 8:00:48:40 a.m., September 11, 2001.
The day was Tuesday. The sky in New York was blue, the sun was shining. The American Airlines Boeing Seven-Six-Seven came straight at that moment and hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
It made a huge hole near the 70th floor of the 110-story building and burst inside, exploding with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel.
At that moment, the course of many things in the next few decades of the world was determined.
Osama bin Laden was on America's 'Most Wanted List' before this incident, but how many people in the world knew the name of Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda?
The September 11, 2001, hijacking of four passenger jets at the same time by al Qaeda was unimaginable.
The two planes went straight and hit two towers at the World Trade Center in New York. At the Pentagon near Washington DC. He crashed into an open field before hitting another target. About three thousand people were killed in the attack that day.
The planning of this attack, the way it was carried out simultaneously, and the impact it had - are not comparable to the recent history of terrorism.
Al Qaeda has carried out terrorist attacks in many places before. It is not new that such extremist religious ideological terrorism is becoming a new threat to America.
But the attack of the Nine-Eleven - in many ways fancy - had a dramatic dimension, an adventure that changed not only America, but the whole world.
While the main goal of US defense and foreign policy after World War II was to stop communism, the Bush administration called for the fight against Islamic militancy in the name of the war on terror in the post-9/11 world. The war on terror began with the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, with Iraq as the next target. The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the ongoing war, killing millions, but the end is yet to come.
The economic collapse of 2008
September 15, 2006 If one day is to mark the most dramatic moment of the global recession of the last decade, it is that day. Lehman Brothers, one of the largest investment banks in the US banking system, declared itself bankrupt today.
Lehman Brothers was the fourth largest investment bank in the United States. Their liabilities amounted to seven trillion dollars. It hit the world money and capital markets so badly that the entire banking system was paralyzed overnight. All the big banks stopped trading among themselves. This financial crisis was engulfing the entire world financial system. The central banks of all major economies, from the United States, Europe, Britain, Canada, Japan and China, were forced to take concerted action to restore public confidence in the banking system.
Many European countries nationalized virtually their entire banking system to save it from bankruptcy.
In the words of Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the US Federal Reserve, this was the worst financial crisis in the history of the world.
However, this crisis was not created in a day, there was a hint of a storm in various incidents. But the funny thing is that the world's banks and financial system's hackers have no idea that all the big banks will go bankrupt in this crisis and the governments of different countries will have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to save them.
The affair first began when home prices began to fall in the United States. Banks lent money to buy homes for people who were at high risk as borrowers. This crisis in the subprime mortgage market gradually put the entire banking system at risk. In 2006, the crisis spread to other countries. One bank after another began to go bankrupt.
The financial crisis triggered a protracted recession in Europe and America. Millions of people lost their jobs. In many European countries, the financial obligations of governments were so great that they had to resort to austerity measures. Many countries have not yet fully coped with the economic downturn.
Arab Spring
If the biggest feature of the Black Swan event is unpredictability, the Arab Spring is probably its biggest example. The winds of change that began to blow in early 2011 blew away the masnad of many dictators who had been in power for decades. But no one was able to give a glimpse of it until the incident started.
The Economist Magazine and its affiliate, the Economist Intelligence Unit, are one of the most credible and important political and economic forecasts in the world.
In their analysis of the Middle East's political-economic situation in 2011, which they published in December, they could not have imagined the political turmoil and mass protests like the Arab Spring.
Mohammed Bouazizi, a fruit seller who set himself on fire in Tunisia, died in January. His janaza that day turned into a protest procession of five thousand people. The protests gradually spread throughout Tunisia. In the face of widespread protests, dictator Gen Abedin Ben Ali had to resign and flee to Saudi Arabia. This was the first success of the Arab Spring.
The protests gradually spread to neighboring Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Syria and the entire Middle East. This movement took the most widespread form in Egypt. There, Hosni Mubarak had to relinquish power. Mass protests in Libya have escalated into a civil war, with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi brutally assassinated by rebels.
But the desire for democracy that sparked the Arab Spring protests soon began to fade.
The military ousted the government of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. Anarchy prevailed in Libya. Civil war broke out in Syria and Yemen, involving various outside powers.
Occupying large swathes of Syria and Iraq, Islamic State militants established a caliphate in their own language. After many bloody battles, the Islamic State was again pushed out of these areas.
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, there is still unrest, war and anarchy in the Middle East.
Coronavirus epidemic
The history of the plague that has now paralyzed the earth is still being written. So we can say the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic, but where, when and how it will end is still unknown.
But even then, according to Nicholas Nasim Taleb's definition of the characteristics of the coronavirus epidemic, the coronavirus epidemic is the most vivid example of a black swan event.
The world was moving at a normal pace even last January. Crowds of cars on the city streets in the morning rush hour. People were running to work. Students in school-college-university. The markets were buzzing. A group of merry people sitting close to the restaurant-bar. Thousands cheer on the football stadium. Crowds of interested shoppers under the bright light in the mall.
Then the invisible virus spread from person to person, from one city to another, from one end of the world to the other. All the noise stopped. Cities are like mortuary.
Many experts are now trying to predict that such an epidemic could happen. But the real truth is that even these experts could not have imagined that the whole world would have to be paralyzed in this way to deal with an epidemic.
We can predict regular small events in advance, but why are we so blind to an irregularly big event? Can't do any fire?
According to Nasim Nicholas Taleb, it is very difficult to predict the Black Swan event, and its impact is far-reaching. Such incidents happen because we do not expect them to happen. And that's why the Black Swan is a huge puzzle.
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