Rearview Mirror
When the Future Collapsed into the Present
"The past is Prologue," states the granite plinth at the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to the National Archives in Washington. But in today's world it is the future that is becoming prologue to the present. More and more of our lives, individually, and collectively, are based on expectations; more precisely on stochastic modeling of expectations -- that is wagers on a range of probability percentages. Animals have temporal expectations, hard-wired as it were, but as a certainty. The squirrel gathers and buries acorns for the winter; birds migrate south and north -- but these activities probably seize them as a present compulsion, not as a calculation of the changes ahead, although to be fair to them I haven't informed myself of possible experiments that might be discriminating between their awareness of the future needs and present compulsion, such as placing the same species in an environment of unchanging temperature and daylight.
Certainly, though, it is our fate as conscious beings to be aware of uncertainty, and over the past three hundred years or so mathematicians and scientists have developed the tools to quantify possible outcomes. Adam Smith said that it was in our human nature to "truck and barter" -- to buy, sell, and exchange. He did not name gambling as such, but his whole tract presupposed that exchanges were motivated not only by consumption needs, but by the prospect of a subsequent exchange that might yield a profit; hence it involved a wager. Stock exchanges and insurance markets flourished in Amsterdam, London and then in many commercial centers despite disastrous crashes.
It is good taste today among knowledgeable commentators to distinguish between "risk," or the subset of uncertainties to which probabilities can be assigned, and uncertainty in general. Being a rather risk-averse individual, I've never been able to instinctively preserve the clear break. It's somewhat akin to former Defense Secretary McNamara's distinction between the "known unknowns" and the "unknown unknowns." But all of those form part of "the fog of war." And by extension the fog of living in time.
It is apparent that contemporary life has vastly expanded the public discussion of risk or probabilistic outcomes. Part of this derives from the massive "financialization" of the economy (another name for its opening to instruments of risk including "derivatives," or wagers on the outcome of wagers, whether on individual stocks or on aggregate indices). Futures trading in commodities -- that is guarantees of a future price or delivery -- was a venerable activity. Mediterranean grain traders in Antiquity bought and sold "futures"; the Japanese established a rice exchange in 1730; the Chicago Board of Trade was established in 1845. In the 1970s futures trading in foreign currencies, government bonds, interest rates and stock market indices surged ahead, and most recently crypto has lured the risk-enthusiastic.
Confronting uncertainty, central bankers vary in their strategies. The United States has just installed Kevin Warsh, who seems far more reluctant to provide so-called "forward guidance" than his predecessor. Paul Tucker, a practitioner of great experience at the Bank of England and the Bank of International Settlements, has contributed a major treatise, Global Discord (Princeton UP, 2022) on the tensions produced in the contemporary effort to manage international economic stability in a world of divergent national interests.
Of course, the international financial system is not the only sphere where probabilistic reasoning has taken on a new glamor. Global health and disease is perhaps the other salient arena, in part because of the recent progress of biologics -- and sadly because of the reappearance of devastating infectious diseases. The COVID pandemic, 2020-22 was the counterpart for the world of health of the financial crisis of 2008-12. The proliferation of Chat GPT with its "large language models" and AI and related applications to the sphere of communication and knowledge techniques reveals related impulses.
But my sense of future collapse or future telescoping is intended to suggest a deeper change than our heightened recourse to stochastic outcomes. Viewed systemically, I believe, these trends tend to collapse our firm sequencing of past, present, and future. If we have long been accustomed to examining the past to understand the present (although often far too simplistically, and with too easy a faith in the techniques of analogies to help in that process), we are less used to thinking of possible futures as currently present. We can't really keep the future at bay any longer. That awareness, however, is lurking ever more tangibly even though it arrives as a probabilistic exercise. Perhaps a premonitory symptom might have emerged a century ago with the formulations of quantum physics and their strange findings of superposition. But now it is our turn to be Schrödinger's cat.
CSM 6/19/2026
A rich piece, Professor Maier. It sent me back to Robert Rubin, whose *An Uncertain World* shaped how I think — his method was pure probability: weigh the distribution, act on the best expected value, accept that a sound process still sometimes yields a bad result. He ran the Treasury that way through the peso crisis and LTCM — your Schrödinger's cat, in a suit.
But rereading him now, what strikes me is how much wider, and graver, the distribution has become. Rubin wagered from a world with a comfortable mean and survivable tails — moderate debt, a Fed with room, dormant inflation, globalization still pulling prices down. What a Bessent must weigh today is more sobering: modern mercantilism reversing that tide, an AI discontinuity no prior Secretary had to price, and a scale of commitment that leaves little room to absorb a bad draw.
The future hasn't only collapsed into the present, as you say — the outcomes it now holds are markedly more serious than the ones Rubin faced.
And as we know, the search for a more certain outcome helps drive the search for the man in the white horse, or house, who will put minds at rest by solving problems representative government seemingly can’t, or not fast enough.