The same is true of the possibility of Donald Trump becoming president. For the political class, the possibility was inadmissible because it meant that all their knowledge was worthless: Anything could happen. For the journalistic class, the possibility was inadmissible because it would mean that their efforts to inform and influence were worthless: They were less trusted than Donald Trump of all people…
How many of the pollsters and aggregators and political journalists attempted to measure, in advance, the likely voting propensity of the people who put Donald Trump over the top? Plenty of articles referenced the potential importance of non-college-educated white voters in the Midwest. Who seriously tried to answer the question of whether the various polls’ assumptions about that propensity were right?
All of that ignorance, meanwhile, fed the growth of the very risk that ultimately undid the system as a whole. That’s the difference between a black swan in zoology and a black swan in finance. Literal black swans exist or don’t regardless of whether we look for them. But if you undervalue the risk in the tail of the distribution, you create an incentive to pile up risk there, which drives the probability of that extreme event up and up. And If you don’t try to value it at all, then you are surely undervaluing it. And if you don’t collect the information that might have told you that the risk out there was increasing, then you’d never know to value it. Similarly, if you don’t ever try to turn qualitative pieces about potential Trump voters in western Pennsylvania into quantitative analysis, how will you know the likelihood that the polls will be wrong?
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