I was going to write a post today about how liquidity in financial markets goes down as concentration of holdings goes up but then I woke up to the news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas last night. I have written extensively before about the need for better gun control, so won’t rehash that today other than to note that the statistics for 2017 show already over 11,000 deaths year-to-date.

What yesterday’s mass shooting does make eminently clear yet again though is just how much damage and trauma a single person can inflict using modern technology. It is so much easier to destroy a life than to build one. Split seconds of pulling a trigger, versus decades of nurturing and growth. This fundamental asymmetry is one that we as humanity need to pay more attention to as we make more technological progress. 

The asymmetry between destruction and creation will never go away. It is baked deeply into the fabric of reality. There are myriads of arrangements of the molecules found in a human body and only a tiny fraction of those arrangements amount to a person who is alive and well. So as we have more and more power at our disposal we need to think carefully about how to prevent ever more destruction brought about by individuals (and small groups). Unfortunately, there are no simple answers here and we will be forced to look at uncomfortable trade-offs.