Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "The 1918-1919 flu pandemic is a reminder that nature may yet do us in..." (more)
Key Phrases: strangelet disaster, abrupt global warming, strangelet scenario, United States, Kyoto Protocol, Soviet Union (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

During his career as a federal appeals court judge, Posner has become a prominently outspoken commentator on a variety of legal and cultural issues. Reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake, for example, was the springboard for this reflection on the current lack of plans for dealing with large-scale disasters, like environmental upheavals, after which law and public policy would be open to blame for failing to keep pace with rapid scientific advancement. Those familiar with Posner's extensive writings will not be surprised when he advocates applying cost-benefit analysis to determine which catastrophic threats are worth tackling first, though other suggestions will likely spark controversy. Criticizing the "blinkered perspective" of civil libertarians hung up on constitutional law, he finds certain curtailments of freedom an acceptable trade-off for preventing terrorist attacks and offers a lengthy justification of torture as one such option. Posner also offers subtle insights into the psychology of disaster preparedness, noting, for example, that science fiction movies in which the world is routinely saved inure us to the possibility of facing such threats in real life, as well as create undue faith in the saving grace of scientists. And his call for increased scientific literacy among public policy leaders may be too pragmatic to fault. Though clearly not for general readers, this thoughtful analysis may trickle down from the wonkocracy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Horrific as the tsunamis that ravaged South Asia were, Richard A. Posner is worried about calamities many thousand times worse. Finding the puzzles presented by his day job on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit insufficiently challenging, Posner has seized upon the risk of mega-catastrophes, particularly events that threaten to extinguish all human life on Earth. His central question in Catastrophe is: How should society respond to the possibility of global warming, nuclear terrorist attacks, planet-obliterating asteroids and similar disasters?

Posner groups catastrophes into four types: natural catastrophes (e.g., a massive asteroid collision); catastrophic accidents caused by unfettered scientific exploration (e.g., a "strangelet" scenario in which hyper-dense quarks produced in a physicist's lab compress the Earth in seconds); unintended byproducts of technological progress (e.g., abrupt climate change); and intentional catastrophes (nuclear terrorism, bioterrorism or even nuclear winter). Catastrophe is worth the price of the book simply for Posner's lively and readable summary of the apocalyptic dystopias that serious scientists judge to be possible. (For a similarly sobering account from one of the world's premier astrophysicists, see Martin Rees's 2003 book Our Final Hour.)

But how can sophisticated citizens think productively about such staggering possibilities? Indeed, is it even worth worrying about such appalling but unlikely tragedies? While the first two chapters of Catastrophe present fascinating information for general readers, chapters three and four will likely leave statistic-phobes cold. Posner advocates using basic cost-benefit analysis -- a widely applied technique developed from economics for carefully weighing pros and cons -- not only to structure the questions, but also to derive some answers. Moreover, based on those answers, Posner recommends that Washington act now. Reviewing the best scientific estimates of likelihoods and consequences, he concludes that the U.S. government should seriously consider prohibiting some types of scientific research, creating new international oversight agencies and imposing blanket restrictions on the study of dangerous subjects by all students from suspect nations. No orthodox University of Chicago conservative he.

The cost-benefit framework Posner recommends is good as far as it goes. Unfortunately, it doesn't go very far in dealing with this class of problems. Students of cost-benefit analysis have long recognized this tool's limits in dealing with extremes. In the classic social science formula, risk equals probability times consequences. Since a species-extinguishing event like Earth colliding with a huge asteroid would be infinitely bad, even the slightest probability of such an event occurring would swamp any cost-benefit calculus.

Posner acknowledges these theoretical difficulties but attempts to finesse them. He does so by making heroic but arbitrary assumptions that leave his conclusions unpersuasive.

If cost-benefit analysis cannot provide convincing answers to questions about what our society should be doing about potential mega-catastrophes, where else can we look? My best suggestion is that we draw lessons from recent practice. The most instructive case is the Cold War threat of total annihilation in nuclear war. For decades, American policymakers faced a grim reality: Soviet nuclear bombs that could destroy American cities and kill millions. This possibility drove policymakers to a categorical imperative: Do everything feasible to prevent such a war. President Reagan expressed it best in his oft-quoted bumper sticker: "A nuclear war cannot be won and must therefore never be fought." To prevent that, Republican and Democratic administrations, with broad public support, spent more than $2 trillion developing and deploying missiles, nuclear weapons, satellite-alert systems, elaborate command-and-control systems -- essentially everything technically feasible to prevent an unthinkable outcome.

In that effort, American leaders recognized the danger that they might compromise higher values. (Remember the old debate about "Better Red than Dead"?) But President Kennedy rightly rejected that choice, arguing that America's goal was "not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom." America's Cold War strategy combined several elements: strength to deter any conceivable Soviet attack; imaginativeness in a global battle for hearts and minds, which was aimed at undermining the appeal of Moscow's Marxist ideology; and a readiness to cooperate with Soviet leaders in ending the Cold War with not a bang but a whimper.

This precedent provides clues for addressing Posner's catastrophic challenges, perhaps most importantly nuclear terrorism. In the first debate of the 2004 presidential campaign, both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry identified nuclear terrorism as "the single most serious threat to the national security of the United States." What should the U.S. government now do to combat that threat? Take a page from the Cold War's imperative by doing everything possible that does not otherwise compromise a higher value or interest -- and do it as quickly as possible, without assuming we have the luxury of time. That would mean locking down all nuclear weapons and materials as securely as gold in Fort Knox; stopping additional states like Iran from acquiring the capacity to make nuclear bombs; and preventing North Korea from becoming a "Nukes 'R' Us."

While the application of cost-benefit analysis Posner so ably champions cannot provide answers to the species-threatening specters he discusses, there are scores of less catastrophic, more urgent and more likely threats -- the recent tsunamis, for example -- that cry out for clarification by applying this methodology. It is now clear that investments costing less than one percent of the price of the current relief efforts in Asia could have provided effective warnings, saving thousands of lives. The larger challenge that Posner and others of his tribe should address is how to narrow the gap between what cost-benefit logic compels and what the U.S. government is doing.

Reviewed by Graham Allison
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition and First Printing edition (November 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195178130
• ISBN-13: 978-0195178135
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #920,953 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Measured Approach to the Apocalypse, November 13, 2004

By	John Thorne (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm a big fan of the judge's books, but this one differs from the prior books in the breadth and gravity of its topic: avoiding extinction.

The book has a gripping description of several such threats -- asteroids, bioterrorists, nuclear meltdown ("strangelets"), sudden global warming, loss of biodiversity. The book is worth buying for the description alone.

The core problem in dealing with these extinction threats is the need to incur large present costs for only speculative future benefits, where the beneficiaries of today's investments will be unknown to anyone living today. Democracies, run by politicians who get voted into office promising benefits to the current voters, can't make such farsighted investments for the benefit of people not yet living (or more precisely, not yet voting).

The best line in the book (near the beginning, so I don't think I'm spoiling it) is that there are probably many billions of stars with planets around them capable of supporting life. Life therefore probably originated independently on many millions of those planets, many of them probably much earlier than here on Earth. So why haven't we been contacted by any of the earlier, presumably more advanced other civilizations?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars OK Survey, but focused for attorneys & politicos, December 23, 2006

By	Jasper Walker "J.W." (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

I purchased the book looking for interesting insights on catastrophes. I have to say I did not expand my knowledge of catastrophes much by reading the book. I did expand my knowledge of the relation between our legal/political systems and catastrophic defense/scientific research.

I thought Posner did a good job surveying different catastrophes and assigning rough estimations to them. However, I felt the key point of his book was promoting more attorneys learning about science so an intelligent discusssion could be made. I agree with the point...but it was such a recurring theme, it became dull for me, since I am not an attorney.

I had not read a book by Posner before. He is a judge, and I felt it read like a judge wrote it. I.e. in most areas he was very careful to be impartial. But then occasionally he would make a blanket opinion without any substantiation and move on as if he had proved some point. You can see examples of this in the other reviews below. I'll only point out I had different examples.

If you are soft skinned, conservative and liberal alike will probably find points of offense in the book. And I guess that is what surprised me the most, that this is a political book, not a scientific one.

3.0 out of 5 stars An academic way to talk about the end of the world, June 16, 2008

By	Thomas M. Magee - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Paperback)

This is a very interesting book but it didn't quite grab me. It is a very academic book, almost like a text book. This book would make a better lecture. Most of his meat in the book comes from economic cost benefit analysis. That information probably comes across better in a lecture.

First the author lays out various threats to not only the country but to the world. He does donate a lot to the end of the world stuff like an asteroid hitting the earth. Then he talks a lot about how to express that danger. He also goes into how to express that risk. That is an interesting thing. The expression of the risk helps society express the worth of solutions. The author goes into standard explanation of present value vs. future value. His method of explaining that response is really interesting. For example he explains how society puts a price value on lives.

His last chapter is a departure of the book style. He has some interesting solutions. Those solutions is a big departure for a judge, but nothing to radical.