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Comment by myth_buster | Hacker News Reader

Behavioral Economics - Thaler Kahneman Tversky et Al.

If you are referencing to the fallout from covid, it's essentially the effect of global commerce coming to screeching halt.

As CEO of GS said, no one has a clue on what's going to happen in Q2 and beyond, and if they say they do, they are BS'g.

It's a Black swan event. Most forecasting models are ineffective. Whether it would be a V, U, L recession is anyone's guess. As it all depends on how politicians react, ie. How late they are to lockdown and how long they will be in that state. Which perhaps is outside the realm of traditional economics. Hence my suggestion.

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It's NOT a black swan event.

Not the OP but we've last had a pandemic of such proportions 100 years ago, and back then the world was not as inter-connected and inter-dependent as it is right now. Even during WW1 and WW2 industry and the economy itself were working (sometimes at full capacity), a fact that it is not happening right now. We've never had half of the planet's population in some sort of lockdown, that is the definition of a "black sawn event".

Yeah, one could say that things could have been better prepared (I'm in that camp), but one can never truly prepare for half of the working population being put on indeterminate leave on such great a scale.

Black Swan events are unknown unknowns. White swan events are known unknowns. Pandemics are White Swan events.

So by your reasoning, a large asteroid discovered to hit earth a month from now would be a white swan event, because we always knew it could happen.

An asteroid is definitionally a Grey Swan. Very unlikely to happen, and of great impact, but still considered possible. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grey-swan.asp

COVID-19s impact wasn't nearly unpredictable or unprecedented enough to be defined as a Black Swan imo. I did know many people both in real life and online who were concerned about it before the impact, considerably different from e.g. 2008 financial crisis.

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