The mere fact that Michael Lewis wrote and published The Premonition: A Pandemic Story while we are still in the midst of it says something about his ability to write while the event is still unfolding or perhaps about the amount of time we have all been dealing with it.

Some readers may be wondering what a book about the pandemic has to do with personal finance and wealth management. Truth is, there continue to be many lessons we can draw from the events leading up to the declaration of the global pandemic, and the many decision-making errors that were made in the ensuing response. Common to both are the cognitive biases that sabotage our ability to make better choices, to extrapolate from data, and develop plans that take into account more possibilities - even those we erroneously think can’t possibly happen.

Michael Lewis first came onto my radar when I read Liar’s Poker, a fascinating book loosely based on his own experience trading bonds on Wall Street in the 1980s. Gritty at times, his writing brought to life characters that could easily have been part of the cast on the bond trading floor I used to be a part of. Lewis also authored the masterful Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, and Flash Boys. So when I heard he was writing about the pandemic, I knew I’d be in store for a literary treat.

There are many themes that emerge from The Premonition, the main one of course, is that we had all the information available ahead of time to have dealt with this crisis more effectively but for the stifling paralysis of bureaucracy, a false belief in our infallibility, and disregard for the importance in a continuity of government at the levels that matter the most.

Lewis devotes considerable ink to excoriating the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and their inability to show any leadership to say nothing of the Trump Administration. Perhaps due in part to previous instances of crying wolf when all that emerged was a kitten, the CDC became politicized, bloated, and lacked the decisiveness required in times of crisis. Perfect being the enemy of good, accepting the goal of being roughly right than being precisely wrong would have saved tens of thousands of lives in 2020.

It’s the human condition that Michael Lewis is so adept at capturing. Characters such as Laura Glass leap off the pages when we learn about her science project that first modeled what social interactions, isolation and distancing could do to the spread of a communicable disease…from over 10 years ago. We meet Dr. Charity Dean, a character who faced down corrosive chauvinism with a dogged determination to gain the attention of a group of scientists and political operatives when it mattered most. She emerged the protagonist in a novel that desperately needed one. In both instances, we meet strong female characters with the courage of their convictions to not give up and face down the systemic faults that have led countless women to give up on their ambitions to our collective detriment. Before the next pandemic, we would do well to bolster the ranks of science with more women, and a more diverse set of capabilities in general.

The cognitive biases that we are all at the mercy of also feature prominently in Lewis’ latest. Chief among them is our inability to conceptualize exponential growth, or conversely, exponential decay. In a pandemic, the more infectious a disease, the quicker the case numbers compound over time. Not unlike an investment, the more time passes the greater an opportunity the investment has to compound. Early on in the pandemic, not only was there a grossly incomplete picture of the numbers of infected people circulating in the population, but the numbers of cases grew to the millions (and likely will reach a billion) with astonishing speed. Much like the starlight we observe in the night’s sky, the data health authorities were basing decisions on was from a time long since passed. While the debate was raging on how best to deal with the case counts that were being reported, the clock kept ticking and the number of cases compounded further. It pays to remember that it all started with one infected individual, but the uncomfortable truth is that avoiding an ‘analysis paralysis’ could have saved lives.

Throughout The Premonition, we are constantly reminded that that those that fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. In the words of Voltaire, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but man always does.” Nowhere more appropriate are these lessons that in the pandemic of 2020. The hubris with which we collectively operative, with little regard for our natural environment, falsely believing we can control all that there is to control, is laid bare by Lewis. The pandemic of 1918 had many of the answers to our current ills. Social distancing? Quarantines? Masking? They all made the difference between how Philadelphia suffered and St. Louis managed – and that was all over 100 years ago! Believing that “this time was different” only made the likelihood that it would be the same even more certain.

There will undoubtedly be more books written on the pandemic we are still experiencing in real time. Inquiries will highlight the failures of government, but the report their commissions publish will be read only by an interested few, and the lessons learned will be even fewer still. Parts of the world are being ravaged by the virus while others are gleefully re-opening their economies. This study of contrasts is a lesson many of us are all too happy to ignore, content in our abilities to resume the lives this virus so unceremoniously interrupted. Whether a coping mechanism or blissful ignorance we want a return to normal, but we would do well to take Lewis’ book as a guide on how not to manage a crisis that has come to define us...until next time.