Pandemie und Politik E-Book

• Herausgeber: Neue Zürcher Zeitung NZZ Libro
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 226

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Lehren aus der Pandemie Auch 2021 drehte sich wieder vieles in der Welt um das Thema Corona, in anderen Facetten, aber durchaus länger, als man gehofft hatte. Die Krise hat weiterhin Themen nationaler wie internationaler Politik und Wirtschaft beeinflusst, und entsprechend widmeten sich die Veranstaltungen und Gespräche den Themen «Pandemie und Politik». Das Jahrbuch präsentiert eine Rückschau auf unsere renommierten Rednerinnen und Redner sowie unseren Austausch mit ihnen. Mit Beiträgen von Mervyn King, Gerhard Schwarz, Ilaria Capua, Christian Lindner, Niall Ferguson, Alain Berset, Anne Applebaum, Sahra Wagenknecht, Elif Shafak und Bertrand Piccard.

Leseprobe

SOZIALWISSENSCHAFTLICHE STUDIENDES SCHWEIZERISCHEN INSTITUTS FÜRAUSLANDFORSCHUNGBAND 48 (NEUE FOLGE)

Begründet vonProf. Dr. Dr. h. c. Friedrich A. Lutz (†)

www.siaf.ch

Pandemie und Politik

Herausgegeben von Martin Meyerund Sabine Sura

Mit Beiträgen von Mervyn King, Gerhard Schwarz,Ilaria Capua, Christian Lindner, Niall Ferguson, Alain Berset,Sahra Wagenknecht, Elif Shafak,Bertrand Piccard

NZZ Libro

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

Der Text des E-Books folgt der gedruckten1. Auflage 2022 (ISBN 978-3-907396-11-7)

© 2022 NZZ Libro, Schwabe Verlagsgruppe AG, Basel

Lektorat: Monika Sieg (deutsch) und Ashley Curtis (englisch)

Umschlagabbildung: picjumbo.com / Viktor Hanacek

Korrektorat: Ruth Rybi, Gockhausen

Gestaltung, Satz: Mediengestaltung Marianne Otte, Konstanz

Datenkonvertierung: CPI books GmbH, Leck

Dieses Werk ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Die dadurch begründeten Rechte, insbesondere die der Übersetzung, des Nachdrucks, des Vortrags, der Entnahme von Abbildungen und Tabellen, der Funksendung, der Mikroverfilmung oder der Vervielfältigung auf anderen Wegen und der Speicherung in Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, bleiben, auch bei nur auszugsweiser Verwertung, vorbehalten. Eine Vervielfältigung dieses Werks oder von Teilen dieses Werks ist auch im Einzelfall nur in den Grenzen der gesetzlichen Bestimmungen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes in der jeweils geltenden Fassung zulässig. Sie ist grundsätzlich vergütungspflichtig. Zuwiderhandlungen unterliegen den Strafbestimmungen des Urheberrechts.

ISBN Print 978-3-907396-11-7

ISBN E-Book 978-3-907396-12-4

www.nzz-libro.ch

NZZ Libro ist ein Imprint der Schwabe Verlagsgruppe AG.

Inhalt

Vorwort

MERVYN KINGUncertainty, Disruption, Hope – How to Analyse the Current World of Economics and Politics

GERHARD SCHWARZDie Schweiz hat Zukunft – Von der positiven Kraft der Eigenart

ILARIA CAPUAThe Circular Nature of the COVID-19 Pandemic

CHRISTIAN LINDNERPandemie, Klima, Digitalisierung: die liberalen Gesellschaftsordnungen im globalen Systemwettbewerb

NIALL FERGUSONThe Great Disasters of the Past and Some Lessons for the Future

ALAIN BERSETPandemie. Politik. Gesellschaft.

SAHRA WAGENKNECHTWarum wir wieder mehr Zusammenhalt und Gemeinsinn brauchen

ELIF SHAFAKPolitics – Society – Literature: Between East and West

BERTRAND PICCARDPioneering Spirit to Invent the Future

Vorwort

Im erneut durch Covid geprägten Frühjahrssemester präsentierten wir handverlesene Gäste im Gespräch aus dem Studio sowie aus dem Literaturhaus und hoben dabei gleichzeitig ein neues Format aus der Taufe: Unsere «SIAF Talks» werden wir auch weiterhin als gute Diskussion vor die Kamera und zu Ihnen nach Hause bringen. Unsere klassischen Vorträge an der Universität dagegen ermöglichen neben dem zusätzlichen Livestreaming-Angebot wieder die persönliche Begegnung vor Ort – und im Herbst konnten wir hier eine nie dagewesene Anzahl und Vielfalt bieten.

Auch 2021 drehte sich wieder vieles in der Welt um das Thema Corona, in anderen Facetten, aber länger, als man gehofft hatte. Die Krise hat weiterhin Themen nationaler wie internationaler Politik und Wirtschaft beeinflusst, und unser Jahrbuch taufen wir entsprechend Pandemie und Politik. Wir freuen uns über diese Rückschau zu den spannenden Veranstaltungen und Gesprächen mit unseren Gästen.

Wir danken allen Partnern, den Referierenden und einer Öffentlichkeit, die uns die Treue hält, für die wertvolle Unterstützung, und freuen uns bereits darauf, Sie auch in den kommenden Semestern wieder begrüssen zu dürfen.

Zürich, im Frühjahr 2022

Dr. Martin Meyer, Präsident des Vorstands SIAF

Sabine Sura, Leiterin der Geschäftsstelle

Uncertainty, Disruption, Hope – How to Analyse the Current World of Economics and Politics

MERVYN KINGDiscussion of 31 March 2021

The former Governor of the Bank of England in conversation with Walter B. Kielholz, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Swiss Reinsurance Company, and Thomas Jordan, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank.

MARTIN MEYER:

A very warm welcome to our guests, especially to Mervyn King, Lord King of Lothbury, former Governor of the Bank of England, Professor at New York University and other eminent institutions – not to mention a former guest speaker at our institute, on an occasion that is very well remembered. Good evening, Lord King, from Zurich to London, from where we are ‘beaming’ you in. It is an honour and a joy to have you with us.

MERVYN KING:

And it’s my pleasure to join you.

MARTIN MEYER:

Wonderful, thank you. I hope you are in good health, and in good spirits.

MERVYN KING:

Absolutely. Sad only that I cannot be with you in person, in Zurich.

MARTIN MEYER:

We will do that next March. That’s a promise. The same of course goes for our friends Thomas Jordan, Head of the Swiss National Bank, and Walter Kielholz, Chairman of Swiss Re. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for joining us for an interesting evening here at the Centre for Global Dialogue in Rüschlikon, near Zurich.

Our topic tonight reads ‘Uncertainty, disruption, hope’: a subject that is perfectly appropriate not only to the current situation, but also to our highly accelerated times. The starting point for our discussion is even more fitting. Earlier last year, Mervyn King and the economist John Kay published a book which got a lot of attention. The book’s title is Radical Uncertainty, and the subtitle reads Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers. Now, we have to realise that the book was published only a few weeks before the corona pandemic emerged and then exploded – an almost magical, almost alchemistic coincidence. And an excellent occasion to invite Lord King here to Zurich to talk with us about our current problems and challenges. And, of course, to discuss them with two eminent scholars in their own fields, Walter Kielholz and Thomas Jordan, long-time friends of Mervyn King.

MERVYN KING:

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be able to discuss the topic of uncertainty with my two distinguished colleagues on the podium. In our book, John Kay and I distinguish between resolvable uncertainty and what we call radical uncertainty. Resolvable uncertainty is the simple kind, the kind that you can describe in terms of probabilities, like tossing a coin that you know is a fair coin; there is a 50 percent chance that it will come down heads.

Radical uncertainty is different. Radical uncertainty is uncertainty that you cannot quantify. The best example of it is actually COVID-19, the challenge we’ve been facing now for over a year. And the reason why it’s so important, and why it’s such a good example, is that it is different from a Black Swan event, which is something you can’t conceivably imagine until you’ve seen it. Because while we knew that there were pandemics, we couldn’t possibly have said, in the middle of 2019, that the probability that a virus would come out of Wuhan in China in December 2019 was 17 percent, 27 percent, or any other number. That would have been a meaningless and distracting statement. Equally, with the banking crisis in 2008: we knew that banking crises existed; we’d been through many of them in several hundred years, in most advanced economies. But that did not enable anybody to say that the probability that Lehman Brothers would collapse in September 2008 was some particular number.

So, radical uncertainty is uncertainty that cannot be quantified. Now, why does this matter? Well, I want to draw out four implications of radical uncertainty, and then to conclude with why we should nevertheless be hopeful.

The first implication of radical uncertainty is that there is no mathematical or objective way of quantifying all risks. We therefore cannot price such risks. If you know the probability of something happening is 50 percent, and you know what the consequences of the event will be, it’s possible – quite straightforwardly – to calibrate what the risk is. That’s what we tend to do with life insurance. But with radical uncertainty there are events where we don’t know what the probability is, and it requires tremendous judgement to be able to successfully quote prices for insurance against those risks. That is the skill of reinsurers, and, of course, especially of Swiss Re. It requires experience and judgement and a culture of understanding risks to be able to offer that kind of insurance. It’s not a simple mathematical calculation.

The second implication is that the world is – in the technical jargon – non-stationary. What we see happening is not simply a random drawing from a known distribution. The world is continuously changing. And that means that we cannot even imagine a simple probability distribution informed by events from the past.

The third implication is that there is far too much bogus quantification in the world. We’ve seen that economic forecasts are typically very poor. The interesting thing in the past 12 months is that the same poor performance in terms of predictions is true of epidemiological models. Now, why is this the case? Models can be very helpful in understanding the nature of a problem. They enable us to simplify, and to focus on the factors that really matter in understanding what is likely to happen in the future. But the reason that economic forecasts and epidemiological forecasts are so poor is that we do not have the information required to judge the values of the key parameters that will determine the path of an epidemic or the path of the economy.

And this is important, because last March, what should have happened was that the epidemiologists should not have tried to make predictions about the path of COVID-19. They should instead have said: ‘These are the key parameters that we need to know and understand in order to judge the future paths’; and so, for example, governments should have been encouraged to carry out random samples of the population and test them, in order to determine the mortality rate of the virus. Because although we knew the numerator – the number of deaths – we didn’t know the denominator – the number of people in the population already infected.

The fourth and last implication I draw out is that there is a very important role for the question, ‘What is going on here?’ I suspect this question plays a prominent role in Swiss Re, and in almost all organisations that are successful in making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. ‘What is going on here?’ sounds like a rather trivial question, but it isn’t, because when we’re confronted with a unique event, an event that we haven’t seen before – we may have seen something similar, but not exactly the same – we have to keep asking the question ‘What is going on here?’ in order to understand the nature of the problem we’re confronted with and then to think through the right answer.

This is particularly important because one of the big challenges for the future is how best to use artificial intelligence. There are many people, including the psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman, who believe that decisions should be made by computers rather than humans, because humans make mistakes, but computers don’t make mistakes of mathematical reasoning. I think this idea is profoundly wrong. It relies on the assumption that the most important decisions we take are ones that can be solved purely by mathematical reasoning, and I don’t believe that’s true. When we’re faced with radical uncertainty, our judgement, experience, and ability to adapt to an unknown situation all matter, and we make use of them together. We do this not as individuals solving problems; rather, we work together to find the solutions to challenges of radical uncertainty.

Finally, we come to hope. There are two reasons why we should be hopeful now for the future. The first is that we’ve learned a great deal about the importance of resilience. After the financial crisis, we learned that it was important that the banking system be resilient, and we changed the regulations to ensure that banks had to issue more equity capital, had to have more liquid assets on their balance sheets, in order to be resilient to unknown disturbances occurring. Sadly, we didn’t apply that lesson to other parts of the economy, and we’ve now seen that we needed our health systems to be more resilient.

The two countries best prepared on paper for a pandemic were the United States and the United Kingdom. That turned out to be false, and the reason is that they had prepared for a pandemic caused by a particular kind of virus: a flu virus. What we got instead was a different kind of virus. We need to prepare for a generic virus. The resilience of our healthcare system is crucial. And resilience is also crucial for businesses. The just-in-time delivery model is bound to be rethought. People will undoubtedly now realise that continuous deliveries and movements of people across borders cannot be guaranteed. Everything we do needs to be resilient to major uncertainties and shocks.

And lastly, we shouldn’t be frightened of uncertainty; we should actually embrace it. Because uncertainty is actually the source of almost all good things in life. When Frank Knight wrote his famous book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit exactly 100 years ago, he believed that radical uncertainty was the source of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs come up with new products and new processes; they don’t just turn a handle on a computer, plug in probabilities and outcomes, and look at the maximising solution that results. Uncertainty generates entrepreneurship, and it’s also the source of great happiness in our personal, business and collective lives. Students often say to me when they leave university that they’re very frightened of the uncertainty about their future lives. And I say to them, ‘You shouldn’t be. You don’t want to know today who you will marry and when; you don’t want to know what jobs you will have during your career; you don’t really want to know which countries you might live in, or visit, or travel through; or which restaurants you might go to in the next year.’ The excitement in life stems from coming across new and unexpected outcomes, things that you can’t quantify, things that you don’t know in advance. That is radical uncertainty, and that, really, in the English phrase, is the spice of life. So, embrace uncertainty. And let me now hand back to our distinguished panel.

MARTIN MEYER:

Thank you very much, Lord King. I couldn’t agree more. How boring a world without uncertainties would be. You mentioned the importance of the human factor in all of these areas: economics, politics, and other fields. You also built a bridge, mentioning Swiss Re twice, so I now ask Walter Kielholz to present his statement.

WALTER KIELHOLZ:

Well, Martin Meyer, I have to say, after 25 years in the reinsurance business and 45 years in business generally, I was really hoping for a very, very boring year – and I am still hoping for that. But I don’t seem to be in that position. Confusion or uncertainty – uncertainty in the real world usually leads to confusion at the decision-making level of a company. It’s really the same word, just another connotation of it. And I would like to point out two or three exceptional characteristics of this particular uncertainty. At Swiss Re we had always given pandemic risk enormous prominence; after financial market risk, it was always our second most important risk. By the way, the Swiss Confederation also had it as its number two risk; after the collapse of the electric grid, I think in Switzerland the second most dangerous risk was actually also that of a pandemic. However, there were two things that I think we misunderstood, or were just unprepared for. One was the length of this event. We thought a pandemic would come, and in a couple of months, it would be over. And now it’s turning into at least two years: two years, at least, from when it started to when it might be declared defeated. It’s an uncertain process. It’s taken twists and turns, and this adds to the confusion at the decision-making level. It’s completely up and down, hope and despair, and activity, and so on. That’s one.

The second thing is, strangely enough, that while we had defined the event, we completely misunderstood where the financial loss would come from. We thought it would come from the life insurance book. People would pass away, and we would have to pay a lot. Or they would be sick, and we would have to pay a lot in healthcare costs. But the biggest cost was actually due to business interruption, and the cancellation of large events. Why? Because all over the world, virtually within two months, all governments actually reacted pretty much the same way: closing down all activities, or certain activities, and making certain big events virtually impossible. So, we knew that the losses were coming, but that they were coming from left field, from business interruption, was a real surprise to us.

There have been other such events that have surprised us, even though we knew that they were there – for example, terrorist risks. Before the attack on the World Trade Center, we had paid out several claims linked to terror-related property damage, and loss of life, and so on. But the sheer size of the World Trade Center risk was a surprise to us – it was just beyond our imagination. Not that the terrorist risk existed, but that there could be a terrorist attack of that size. At that time our company paid out six and a half billion Swiss francs in damages, due to something that only lasted two hours – don’t forget, it lasted two hours. The pandemic will have lasted two years.

Another thing that I would say is interesting to compare is that from 1945 to 1975, or somewhere around there, not a single heavy hurricane hit the East Coast of the United States – or maybe one, Betsy. From 1976 onwards, and especially from 1980 onwards, there has been a large number every year. Something had changed in the parameters of that risk and the explanation was by no means clear. We only knew that Florida, say, looked completely different in 1945 than it did in 1976. In 1945, Miami Beach was just donkeys and palm trees. So that is something where you can actually then say, ‘Yeah we understand, that is the mistake we made in actually assessing that risk.’

Another example is provided by earthquakes. We understand earthquakes very well; we know where the earthquake zones are. We know that Taiwan, California and Japan are dangerous, as are Italy and Turkey, and so on. And we can say, ‘Okay, we ought to have an earthquake in Turkey, because there is a seismic gap, and an earthquake in Turkey, or wherever, is overdue.’ But if we compare the decision-making time frame of a human being with geological time, it’s only a matter of geological seconds. I mean, we think in terms of a 100 years, and whether this earthquake comes a 100 years earlier or a 100 years later simply cannot be reasonably determined. So, these are all cases in which the limitations of making risk models are very apparent.

Now, just to make a remark on the pandemic as we go forward. I think, slowly, it’s becoming clear who the losers and the winners are, and the measures which are now being taken will make other losers, and other winners. And I’m a little bit afraid because after a pandemic, there comes a political showdown. In the past, kingdoms have collapsed. Chinese emperors, and whole dynasties, have collapsed, and so on. And the political debate which will follow COVID is already becoming extremely aggressive. The losers are slowly realising that they are the losers. And after the fear is over, the last phase of such an event comes, and that is the assignment of guilt, the assignment of blame. The politicians, the institutions, the system, the epidemiologists, the people who think the earth is flat: everybody will assign blame to the others. I was already afraid in 2009, after the financial crisis, that we would see a political impact that we would not be able to control, and this time will be worse, in my view. So efforts must be made to ensure that liberal Western democracies can deal with the political impact, so that they are not seen by the people as the losers when compared to authoritarian regimes, which, backed by their own propaganda, can show the world that the centralised authoritarian system has a structural advantage over liberal democracy. That is my worst fear, at the present point.

And I have a lot of hope. Don’t forget that the annual excess mortality in the United States in January was about 4,000 people. It’s now down to less than 500. There is hope. Thank you.

MARTIN MEYER:

Thank you, Walter. They corrected it very quickly in America. Surprising, and not, because we know that this great nation is capable of many things. And, as you say, it’s also too early to say what the final or even the medium-term impact of the corona pandemic will be. Hopefully, it will not be as gloomy as one scenario mentioned in your introduction. Thomas Jordan, please, your statement.

THOMAS JORDAN:

Thank you, Martin, for the invitation. It’s really a pleasure to be on the same panel as my friends Sir Mervyn and Walter. Clearly, uncertainty and disruption are among the key issues, not only for the world but also specifically for us central bankers. Uncertainty is part of our daily business, we have to live with it all the time. Sometimes it’s larger and sometimes it’s smaller, but we always have to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. And of course, if we look back at the last 15 years, we see that our forecasts have often been wrong. And it was sometimes very difficult to produce these forecasts. But it’s not only about the forecast itself – it’s sometimes genuinely difficult to know exactly what the state of the economy is at a given moment in time and to construct a so-called ‘nowcast’ of business activity. As Martin said before, it’s often unclear. What’s also uncertain is the impact of our measures – what is the impact of changing interest rates in a specific situation? Of having QE programmes, etc? And having answers to these questions is very important for conducting monetary policy. So, as Mervyn mentioned, we are more or less in a situation of radical uncertainty. We cannot know the distribution of events with any exactitude. It would be far preferable to be in a situation of resolvable uncertainty – but, of course, we do not choose the world we’re in. Instead, we live in a world where completely new events sometimes arise out of the blue. When this happens, our existing models are of little use, and do not give us the guidance we need.

Now, it’s exactly in these situations that we have to make the most important and far-reaching decisions. We cannot say, ‘Well, the uncertainty is too high, we won’t make any decisions today.’ We are forced to make decisions in these very difficult moments. And then of course we cannot rely only on the models.

Let me briefly explain our approach at the SNB. As I stated, we cannot rely exclusively on models, but nevertheless, models do remain very important. We have to have a structured discussion, a picture of the functioning of the world, even if our forecast may be wrong. So we use these models. They are tools for us. And we don’t use just one, but rather a variety of models to get a better picture of the world. In line with Mervyn’s advice, the Governing Board of the SNB does not use a computer to make its decisions. Instead, our decisions are reached in part through intensive discussions. Furthermore, these discussions do not take place solely between the members of the Governing Board, but rather include a broad range of experts on our staff. We conduct a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of the situation in order to understand the range of options at our disposal. And often it’s not black and white, so there is a certain range of options available to us. The goal is always to make a robust decision. Given the uncertainty surrounding these events, we know that it will probably not be the optimal one, but nevertheless, we try to make a robust decision that is sufficiently good, and that fulfils our mandate. What we try to avoid is fine-tuning, which is invariably problematic, because when your ambition is to find the absolute best solution, you frequently end up with a very bad solution.

Circumstances often change quickly, in which case we reanalyse the situation in light of the new information, we redo the cost-benefit analysis and we adjust our measures accordingly. Over the past couple of years, we have experienced this many times. Let me cite just one example, which has already been mentioned: the COVID-19 crisis. We realised in late February or early March of last year that global conditions had changed substantially and that we could no longer rely on the forecast we had produced in December 2019. Furthermore, we had no models that could really capture the pandemic situation. So our experts had to create a new forecast – based on scenarios – that then became the basis for our judgement and our decisions. And that was very helpful. We need these experts in order to better understand the world. It was then possible to make reliable decisions and rapidly introduce new facilities. I’ll just mention here the refinancing facility that we use to provide the liquidity for the COVID-19 programme in Switzerland, but also the decision we made to attempt to absorb most of the pressure on the Swiss franc produced by this crisis, which is the greatest crisis of this century.

I would also like to end by saying a few words about hope. Like Mervyn, I was surprised by the resilience demonstrated by a large part of our economy. That has been really positive. And I’m also very hopeful that our vaccination programme will continue to improve the situation. So I remain an optimist, and I hope for more normal times. Thank you, Martin.

MARTIN MEYER:

Thank you very much, Thomas. To be an optimist is always good, even if the Swiss sometimes have an inclination towards pessimism, or at least scepticism. But these times present a very challenging situation for our National Bank, and I think the impact of your human competence, as opposed to artificial intelligence, should be highly esteemed. So, we are fully in agreement.

Now, I have another question for Lord King. In view of the current political and economic challenges, where do you see the greatest risks, and where do you see the opportunities right now?

MERVYN KING: