Applications in Geopolitics
In The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing, political scientists Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat propose to apply the fat tail concept to geopolitics. As William Safire notes in his etymology of the term, a fat tail occurs when there is an unexpectedly thick end or “tail” toward the edges of a distribution curve, indicating an irregularly high likelihood of catastrophic events. This represents the risks of a particular event occurring that are so unlikely to happen and difficult to predict that many choose to ignore their possibility. One example that Bremmer and Keat highlight in The Fat Tail is the August 1998 Russian devaluation and debt default. Leading up to this event, economic analysts predicted that Russia would not default because the country had both the ability and willingness to continue to make its payments. However, political analysts argued that Russia’s fragmented leadership and lack of market regulation—along with the fact that several powerful Russian officials would benefit from a default—reduced Russia’s willingness to pay. Since these political factors were missing from the economic models, the economists did not assign the correct probability to a Russian default.
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