Here are 20 tips for a safe weekend: Amanda Ripley busts 10 myths that could save your life in a disaster while Nassim Nicholas Taleb outlines 10 points to save the world from financial cataclysm. [%comments]
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A game I sometimes play in my head is how I would react if trapped in one of many disasters such as the Titanic, WTC, etc. This was probably the result of reading “Doc Savage” as a youth.
Let’s say in the Titanic–wasn’t living on the iceberg an option? (It has been done!) Weren’t there enough bottles to empty to float everyone? Why weren’t the water-tight doors in the stern closed so that when the ship broke in two… etc.
(PLEASE let’s not answer these!).
In the WTC….Why did NOBODY have a parachute in their locker? Among 3,000 people there must have been 30 who had skydiving experience. I know many thought help was coming and the WTC would never fall, but I always imagine I’d have been in the shipping department building cardboard gliders. (With all respect for the victims.)
I once wrote a paper that used a lot of the concepts in Ripley. I read a kind of lay-audience book by the sociologist Barry Glassner called The Culture of Fear that was quite enlightening about how our media steers us wrong. I also read a much more scholarly book by a guy named Fischer (Harry, or Henry I think was the first name) that was also fairly engaging, for academic sociology.
Basically, people tend to be decent and rational, even in disasters. Great stuff.
“Developed nations experience about as many calamities as undeveloped nations. The difference is in the death toll. Of all the people who died from disasters from 1985 to 1999, 65 percent came from nations with incomes below $760 per capita, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ”
Ok, but this stat is useless for measuring relative risk unless we also know the relative proportions of populations in countries with incomes <$750 per capita.
Amazing how even after everyone accepts that stats can be misleading they are used with joyous abandon.
What does Levitt think of the anti-academic note in Taleb’s piece: ‘Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, **marginalising the economics and business school establishments**, **shutting down the “Nobel” in economics**, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.’