Your Guess is as Good as Mine
Then there’s the big unknown: the crazy, disconnected, counterintuitive change set in motion this year that we’ll only be able to piece together in hindsight.
Capital Thinking • Issue #747 • View online
To grasp how hard it is to predict what will happen after the world is thrown upside down – as it has been this year – you have to know the absurd story of how one of the most important agricultural developments of modern history came to be.
We Have No Idea What Happens Next
Morgan Housel | The Collaborative Fund Blog:
It started in 1815 when the volcano Mt. Tambora in Indonesia erupted.Tambora was an utter disaster – the more you read about it the more you realize few adjectives suffice.
It was the largest volcanic eruption in human history, 100 times more powerful than Mount St. Helens. Ten thousand locals died instantly.
Most of those who survived the blast went on to die of starvation after nearly all vegetation on the island of Sumbawa was destroyed.
Then came the real catastrophe.
The volcanic eruption column surged 26 miles into the sky, pushing debris deep into the stratosphere – one of only a handful of times it’s happened in human history.
And there was an epic amount of debris: Tambora ejected enough ash to cover the equivalent of California two-feet deep.
Ash then drifted around the globe, where it caused havoc.
You’ve probably seen pictures of San Francisco this summer when smoke and ash from wildfires temporarily turned the sky dark crimson.
Tambora did that to much of the world. And it did it for several months.
Thus began what became known as The Year Without A Summer.The sun blocked by ash, global temperatures fell an average of 1.5 degrees in 1816, marking the coldest year of recorded history.
Europe saw snow through July, much of it coming down not white but greyish orange, mixed with ash. New York saw frost in August.
New Englanders began referring to the year as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.Freezing temperatures and low sunlight became an agricultural disaster. Crops failed throughout the world. Famine followed.
Europe – already struggling in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars – was hit particularly hard. Germany had it worst.Hunger and surging food prices turned a desperate, agitated population into rioters.
A German mayor wrote:
The inflation and hunger was felt so hard by many that in order for them and their children to survive, they boiled snails and cooked green cabbage from so called pig’s ears and ate them, whereby they became enfeebled and often could no longer work, and even worse could not walk, and as a result of the hunger their feet swelled and their heads swelled.
One of those starving Germans was a 13-year-old boy named Justus von Liebig.
Liebig was an unremarkable child, labeled in school as “hopelessly useless.”
But he liked to tinker and experiment. Liebig’s father was a paint manufacturer, and introduced the boy to industrial chemistry, which he fell in love with.
Justus von Liebig then decided two things.
Morgan Housel
Then there’s the big unknown: the crazy, disconnected, counterintuitive change set in motion this year that we’ll only be able to piece together in hindsight.
The kinds of things that only happen when seven billion people have their lives thrown upside down, experience a bunch of stuff they’d never imagined, and are either motivated or forced to do something completely different than they had considered in January.
No one should even guess what that might be. The unpredictability is the point.But when good vaccine news came out this week, several people said, “there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
Maybe. But I suspect we have no idea what happens next.
Photo credit: DEVN on Unsplash