When disaster strikes
The excellent FT Magazine has a review by Michael Skapinker of recent books on disaster and resilience. I don’t agree with the selection of books on offer (I think Lee Clarke, for instance, provides a much better analysis of worst case scenarios and their impact on humans), but Skapinker’s article makes for interesting reading all the same.
Aside from the now familiar explanation of black swans, our inability to anticipate them and our frequent failure to ‘connect the dots’ (as with the FBI officer in Minneapolis who told an uninterested headquarters that he was ‘trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center’), the most interesting part of this review is about the difficulties that governments and the private sector have in evaluating risks and – based on their analysis – doing something about it.
According to Skapinker tragedy and disaster excites us:
Years after the immense San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which left 3,000 dead and half the city’s population destitute, Kathleen Norris, one of the survivors, said: “How I wish that to every life there might come, if only once, such days of change and freedom … Everyone talking together, dishevelled, excited, running to see what was happening elsewhere, running back, endlessly diverted, satiated for once with excitement.”
Our relationship with disaster is complex.
Our imaginations are drawn to calamity, as the entertainment industry knows: consider disaster movies such as The Towering Inferno or Titanic, or the popularity of fairground attractions such as the “ride of death”. When real disaster happens, we cannot help feeling something of the same thrill – provided we are not among the injured or bereaved. From the survivors and the families, as well as from the media, comes the demand to find out who knew what and when, who could have prevented the tragedy, and how the government plans to ensure it never happens again. The call for revenge is strong: 9/11 resulted in two wars that are still unwon.
The bad news is that we remain both unable to forecast calamity, and reluctant to pay the price of prevention.
Consider climate change: the overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion is that it is man-made, yet how many of us are prepared to give up our cars or holiday flights to mitigate its effects? The good news however is that we are becoming increasingly more resilient to shocks.
As Skapinker says much of the official response to 9/11 for example resulted in improvements for the future – the replacement buildings on Ground Zero will be sturdier and safer than the Twin Towers, for example. And it has always been the case that disasters create the spur for better infrastructure: fires and floods in the earliest days of American settlement led to the creation of insurance, fire brigades and safety regulations.
