The Black Swan & the Benedict Option

Just finished lunch, and am about to go bake some bread for the fambly before settling down to write a lecture I have to deliver tomorrow. Boys in backyard, Julie and Nora sleeping. I tell you all this so y'all don't fuss at me for blogging when I ought to be doing other stuff! ;-D

But I did want to tell you this. As Elizabeth noted in the "Hitting the wall" thread, it's my job to survey the world for trends that portend the End of Civilization, and let you know about it. Yesterday I read in "Wealth, War and Wisdom," the new book by the ex-Morgan Stanley investment wizard Barton Biggs, his advice that one of the best ways to get through really hard times (e.g., war, economic collapse) is to have a farm. Not a large farm, a small farm. Excerpt:

If wars and apocalypses are recurring and inevitable, what should the person with wealth do? Experience suggests, that for in-country wealth, land and properties in your own country are the safest havens in a chaos-prone, vulnerable world. An unostentatious farm or farmland, not a great estate, is probably best. Bricks-and-mortar real estate can be expropriated or bombed, but the land is always there. It can't be plundered or shipped off to somewhere else. During World War II in most of the occupied countries, if you had a self-sufficient farm, you could hunker down on it and with luck wait out the disaster. At the very least you were sure of food in a starving country.

He says that for people who have the money to do so, now would be a good time to acquire a farm "somewhere off the beaten track but which you can get to reasonably quickly and easily." He says that people who can should have a "safe haven" that's self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food, and with supplies that could get you through should there be some kind of breakdown of law and order. Biggs doesn't come across as an alarmist, but he says that history indicates that apocalypses come swiftly, and that the rich are almost always far too complacent to prepare for them in advance. "Events move much faster than anyone expects, and the barbarians are on top of you before you can escape," he writes.

Biggs advises his readers to look for "Black Swans," a concept discerned by statistician and financial strategist Nassim Taleb, who wrote a bestselling book about it. Taleb's website is here, and well worth exploring. Here, in a Forbes article, Taleb lays out his basic Black Swan argument. It starts like this:

Before the discovery of Australia, Europeans thought that all swans were white, and it would have been considered completely unreasonable to imagine swans of any other color. The first sighting of a black swan in Australia, where black swans are, in fact, rather common, shattered that notion. The moral of this story is that there are exceptions out there, hidden away from our eyes and imagination, waiting to be discovered by complete accident. What I call a "Black Swan" is an exceptional unpredictable event that, unlike the bird, carries a huge impact.

It's impossible for the editors of Forbes.com to predict who will change the world, because major changes are Black Swans, the result of accidents and luck. But we do know who society's winners will be: those who are prepared to face Black Swans, to be exposed to them, to recognize them when they show up and to rigorously exploit them.

In Biggs' view, those who will survive a societal catastrophe (economic collapse, plague, war, a terrorist attack that wipes out the electric grid, etc.) will be those who first identified the Black Swan portending the future, and acted on that knowledge.

Doing things like, I guess, taking the Benedict Option, and establishing some sort of rural, or semi-rural, or even small-town community to help batten down the hatches and keep the family and the community's life and culture together during extraordinarily difficult, chaotic times. Yet as Biggs points out, in talking about investing with crisis in mind, if you move too early, it's no better than having been wrong in the first place. Move too late and, well, you get crushed. Biggs concludes with:

Waiting until the barbarians are at the gates is now good. You have to act in anticipation that some day in the future barbarians in one disguise or another will be at the gates. The difficulty is that the barbarians next time will not look or act the same as the barbarians last time -- but they will be just as confiscatory and rapacious.

Who sees Black Swans today? What are they? Tell us. My candidates: the dying of the bees (portending the weakening of the immune systems of living creatures; the autism and autism-related illness spikes are part of this too) and the strange weather patterns (climate change and its disruptive effects). I should add as well that the failure of the public schools is a Black Swan in this country, it seems to me. Whatever your view is, liberal or conservative, for why public schooling is in trouble in this country -- that is, no matter who you blame for the problem -- the fact that it is in trouble, and for a complicated set of reasons, and because we don't seem to have it within us to pull out of the crisis, says something profound about the deeper cultural currents within America.