Bubble Delusions and Coronavirus

It can often be tempting to retreat to a bubble. Life would be so much simpler if we didn’t have to deal with all the complexities of family or life administration or career. Many teenagers do this as they start to work out that life is more difficult than animated movies might suggest; especially boys end up in their rooms with video games and minimal contact with the world outside.

One symptom of a bubble mentality is to over-simplify things. People are either good or evil, opinions are either right or wrong, parents are either good or bad, immigrants are either a blessing or a curse. Such assumptions can be necessary to move us away from the paralysis of confusion. The problem comes when we believe them too rigidly and forget to challenge, modify or see nuance in them.

One way I learned this was early in my business career, working for Shell’s UK retail unit and trying to agree a pricing policy for fuel. We were always the most expensive, because our costs were high and we had a snobbish belief in our superior quality. One day, somebody produced a simple pie chart, in primary colours with solid lines, showing the market divided into price conscious buyers and those not influenced by price.

It was all we needed. We could continue to price high and not worry about it. We were not interested in all those bright red people on one side of the pie, but could count on those more refined folk on the blue side. We had found an assumption, it reaffirmed our bias, it simplified our choices, and we proceeded to plan policy around it, and then fail to adapt when things went wrong.

Of course things did go wrong. Those solid dividing lines between blue and red turned out to be very blurry, and within each colour there were many shades. Worse, the lines moved, partly even as a reaction to our own policy, and could even move suddenly in response to some unforeseen event like a new market entrant or national shortage or the like. It took us a long time to accept the error of our ways, and arguably our business never recovered.

I realise that I sound very stupid in telling this story. I have probably described it worse than it was, but we were indeed pretty dumb. Yet we were not normally dumb people, and I believe most of us make this sort of mistake all the time. We were trapped in our bubble.

Move from business into the wider world and especially politics, and bubbles are everywhere. A very common type of bubble is origin of prejudice, the division of humanity into them and us.

Biological differences between genders in terms of reproductive roles and physical strength turned into a rigid segmentation, with assumptions about emotions and societal roles tagged along. Now we learn that there were always all sorts of sub-segments, blurred lines and associated wrong-headed assumptions that held back society for millennia.

The same dangerous over-simplification has led to religious persecutions and beliefs of superiority and even being chosen races. The damages of colonisation and slavery started the same way. In each case a bias and a search for simplicity led to sweeping policy prescriptions of unconscionable damage. And, in each case, it eventually ends badly as the hidden complexities emerge, resentments are fed while believers dig in, and external events lead to sudden shifts. South Africa of 1994 will one day be Israel.

The feeding of resentments is a key point. In Shell, we pushed up prices to the point that we were insulting people. It worked until it didn’t. Any individual who worked out they were being abused was lost to the brand forever and made sure they told lots of others about it too.

Nationalism is the latest form of bubble mentality. It started long before Trump. Once again, I find roots in the 1980’s. One of the most famous quotes of Margaret Thatcher was that there is no such thing as society. I expect she was making a point that people should not expect the state and others to simply give them a living or allow them to do whatever they liked. But it is still a revealing quote. Society does exist. It is what blurs the lines and segments and moves them over time and responds to surprises. It is society that has shifted in waves in things like reactions to immigrants, religious belief, homophobia and so much more.

Thatcher’s policies reflected this bubble thinking. The individual was king and the nation stood alone. Losers should just get ”on yer bike” or accept pitiful trickle down. It had its merits; at the time a rebalancing away from welfare dependency and union power was needed. But over time the approach did a lot of damage, which persists today anywhere where the right holds sway. Electorally it can work so long as the base stays strong enough. If you can be convinced GDP and corporate health and the markets are true and sufficient indicators of success, then it does well for a time. But resentments grow and external surprises can reveal the flaws very quickly.

Trump’s nationalism takes all this to another level. Trade partners are seen as rivals from another fixed segment. The Sunni people are lumped together as terrorists and left to suffer under tyrants and US bombs, all the while building resentments. The Southern border is a dividing line as stark as on a pie chart, even though the nations are interdependent and Hispanics are already prevalent as US citizens. 

This all builds on the perception that we can live in our gated communities while those outside are prepared to serve us, or at least that we continue to go about our business without thinking too much about the homeless all around us or the incarcerated, in an economy that has most living pay check to pay check, without health insurance and probably hustling on the edge of the law.

This works by some metrics, and is even some sort of electable coalition, though in the long run the very actions of one segment will move the lines to make that segment smaller. Trump's base has proved unusually resilient so far, helped by the bifurcation of media.

But then come surprises. Coronavirus is such a surprise. Just like climate change, it dispels the myth that segments can live independently of each other. We all inhabit the same planet and have overlapping vulnerabilities.

How would you envisage a nation least well equipped to handle Coronavirus despite being rich? There would be lots of big, dirty cities where rich and poor lived side by side. Healthcare would be expensive and unaffordable to many, and healthcare support providers disrespected. Many would need to work even when sick, for lack of decent tenure, wages, or sick pay. There would be a general culture of not respecting authority or following rules, and lots of ambiguity and distrust between federal and state levels. Federal expertise would have been gutted, but what remained would be so insular and arrogant as to ignore established international good practice, meanwhile screwing up the development of its own alternative tests. The most senior leader would have no credibility among one half and could happily lie to the other, and would be so obsessed by markets and retaining power as to ignore the health needs of his own people.

This is today’s US bubble. Bubbles are never sustainable and are vulnerable to surprise shocks. Sometimes those shocks even burst them completely. Dare I hope, or will this dream fade and die like all the others?