So we’re always happy to see him getting major press. You could do a lot worse than Taleb, whom we’ve called the Patron Saint of Strong Towns thinking, as a guide to the new normal (which was actually the old normal, you just didn’t know it yet). This includes our era's veritable prophet of risk and uncertainty: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who co-authored a January 26th paper warning that the spread of COVID-19 would be "nonlinear" and potentially severe. Not only have epidemiologists been sounding the alarm and urging pandemic preparedness for many years, but so have many scholars who study risk, randomness, and uncertainty. You spin the roulette wheel enough times, eventually you lose. It did not take a crystal ball to predict that something like the global spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus would eventually occur. But they are statistically almost inevitable, given enough time, enough disruption of wild habitat (allowing zoonotic diseases to make the leap into humans), and enough mass movement of people and goods around the world. They are not individually predictable, in the sense that we know what sort of new pathogen will emerge in what location in what year. Pandemics are predictable events, in a sense.
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