Q&A: Ron Dembo on crowd-spotting black swans

Veteran quant argues large groups are better at gauging extreme uncertainty than small teams of experts

The future isn’t what it used to be – at least, not if judged by the financial industry’s efforts at modelling it.

Time and again, the standard method of estimating losses by looking at what has happened before – imagining the future by selectively replaying the past – has been found wanting.

Covid-19 is just the latest example. For every day that passes with the world’s largest economies under lockdown, the outlook darkens – tens of billions of dollars in loan losses, double-digit hits to