A World in Denial of What It Knows
By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
NYT
Bath, England
COULD there be a single phrase that explains the woes of our time, this dismal age of political miscalculations and deceptions, of reckless and disastrous wars, of financial boom and bust and downright criminality? Maybe there is, and we owe it to Fintan O’Toole. That trenchant Irish commentator is a biographer and theater critic, and a critic also of his country’s crimes and follies, as in his gripping if horrifying book, “Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger.”
He reminds us of the famous if gnomic saying by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the United States secretary of defense, that “There are known knowns... there are known unknowns ... there are also unknown unknowns.” But the Irish problem, says Mr. O’Toole, was none of the above. It was “unknown knowns.”
What he means is something different from denial, or evasion, irrational exuberance or excess optimism. Unknown knowns were things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to “unknow.”
Unknown knowns were everywhere, from Wall Street to Brussels, from the Pentagon to Penn State. Ireland merely happened to offer an extreme case, where “everyone knew.” They just chose to forget that they knew — about the way that Irish banks ran wild, how easy credit fueled a monstrous explosion of property prices and speculative house-building. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister at the time of the rapid economic growth, merely boasted, “The boom is getting boomier,” preferring to unknow the truth that booms always go bust.
(More here.)
NYT
Bath, England
COULD there be a single phrase that explains the woes of our time, this dismal age of political miscalculations and deceptions, of reckless and disastrous wars, of financial boom and bust and downright criminality? Maybe there is, and we owe it to Fintan O’Toole. That trenchant Irish commentator is a biographer and theater critic, and a critic also of his country’s crimes and follies, as in his gripping if horrifying book, “Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger.”
He reminds us of the famous if gnomic saying by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the United States secretary of defense, that “There are known knowns... there are known unknowns ... there are also unknown unknowns.” But the Irish problem, says Mr. O’Toole, was none of the above. It was “unknown knowns.”
What he means is something different from denial, or evasion, irrational exuberance or excess optimism. Unknown knowns were things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to “unknow.”
Unknown knowns were everywhere, from Wall Street to Brussels, from the Pentagon to Penn State. Ireland merely happened to offer an extreme case, where “everyone knew.” They just chose to forget that they knew — about the way that Irish banks ran wild, how easy credit fueled a monstrous explosion of property prices and speculative house-building. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister at the time of the rapid economic growth, merely boasted, “The boom is getting boomier,” preferring to unknow the truth that booms always go bust.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Dear Mr. Wheatcroft:
Your breakthrough identification of the choice to not know, in your January 1st NY Times’ essay, catches the very essence of an essential theme we are developing. It is that the ignoring and failure to assess the impact of randomness—the interaction of predictability, risk, and uncertainty lie at the heart of the series of financial dislocations that have been engulfing the world with greater speed and larger size.
We argue in an attached start-up blog post entitled “Beyond Rumsfeld” (http://taffywilliams.blogspot.com/2011/04/beyond-rumsfeld-by-stephen-boyko-and.html)– that not providing the subjects to the Rumsfeldian predicates for the construction of complete-thought sentences where predictability is the known knowns, risk is the known unknowns, and uncertainty is the unknown unknowns, have enabled societal deniability, and, inevitably, financial disaster.
We are most anxious to bring this big, overarching, thought to the attention of the world’s financial policymakers. Your perceptions, expressed in the essay, encourage us to ask what you think about it, and possibly to give us some guidance as to how to proceed .
With great appreciation for your attention
Sincerely,
Stephen A. Boyko
Author of “We’re All Screwed! How toxic regulation will crush the free market system”
Email: n2keco@bellsouth.net
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