The fact that exponential growth is not intuitive has already been discussed several time in this blog (e.g. ‘Why the Fourth Revolution is the Era of the Exponential, and How this Changes Everything‘, or ‘The Exponential and the Black Swan: The Counter-Intuitive World of the Fourth Revolution‘). And this lack of intuitiveness explains much of the hesitations and poor response in the face of the Covid-19 pandemics – by individual as well as politicians.
While news focused on absolute numbers, what was important was the rate of growth per day and whether it abated with confinement measures. The rash absolute rate of increase surprised everyone, just because it is so difficult to apprehend the power of exponential growth.
But that should have been so easy to compute and model. Maybe more difficult to explain to the general public, but how could decision makers get surprised? At some stage the evolution of the pandemic became quite predictable for each region.
The new Collaborative Age is indeed the age of the exponential. Exponential growth of companies and economies, and exponential growth of pandemics and catastrophic events.
