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Catastrophe: Risk and Response

3.6 out of 5 stars 11 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0195306477
ISBN-10: 0195306473
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press (December 8, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0195306473
  • ISBN-13: 978-0195306477
  • Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 0.9 x 5.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,282,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

By John Thorne on November 13, 2004
Format: Hardcover 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?
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Format: Hardcover
This book does a very good job of arguing that humans are doing an inadequate job of minimizing the expected harm associated with improbable but major disasters such as asteroid strikes and sudden climate changes. He provides a rather thorough and unbiased summary of civilization-threatening risks, and a good set of references to the relevant literature.

I am disappointed that he gave little attention to the risks of AI. Probably his reason is that his expertise in law and economics will do little to address what is more of an engineering problem that is unlikely to be solved by better laws.

I suspect he's overly concerned about biodiversity loss. He tries to justify his concern by noting risks to our food chain that seem to depend on our food supply being less diverse than it is.

His solutions do little to fix the bad incentives which have prevented adequate preparations. The closest he comes to fixing them is his proposal for a center for catastrophic-risk assessment and response, which would presumably have some incentive to convince people of risks in order to justify its existence.

His criticisms of information markets (aka idea futures) ignore the best arguments on this subject. He attacks the straw man of using them to predict particular terrorist attacks, and ignores possibilities such as using them to predict whether invading Iraq would reduce or increase deaths due to terrorism over many years. And his claim that scientists need no monetary incentives naively ignores their bias to dismiss concerns about harm resulting from their research (bias which he notes elsewhere as a cause of recklessness).
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Format: Paperback
Description and analysis of the catastrophic risks constitute at once the centerpiece and the main strength of the book. Judge Posner helps the reader surmount -- at least conceptually -- the difficult valuation problems posed by catastrophic risks by applying helpful techniques to facilitate the relevant cost-benefit analysis. The book's central problem, however, is that it attempts to use an exposition of relatively piecemeal risks as a justification for fundamental changes in legal institutions, changes that would be better justified by proof of systemic problems in those institutions themselves. This flaw is likely a byproduct of Posner's attempt to have the book serve the divergent ends of detailing and expounding upon specific, diverse risks, on the one hand, and making general policy recommendations, on the other; but it's an astonishing flaw in light of Posner's own respect and preference for empirical support wherever possible. Posner's final analysis obscures the possibility that the efficient solution to failures to spend enough to prevent or mitigate certain catastrophes may be simply to spend more money within existing frameworks, rather than to revamp U.S. legal procedure, education, and institutions. Since the book's stated focus is only these catastrophes (p. 6), it fails to rule out more conservative solutions, casting some of Posner's broader suggested reforms in a speculative light.
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Format: Hardcover
The cliche of fearing only those who are afraid surely holds true for this book. Posner, a judge, wants lawyers to sit in judgement of which research should go forward and which curtailed. He has lined up a string of threats we face in terms of "catastrophic" loss of human life. There are bolides cruising in space eager to smash into our planet and repeat on us what one did to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Physicists tinkering with subatomic particles could trigger a reaction that would shrink the Earth to a sphere 100 metres across. "Bioterrorism" is the next thrust from "America's" off-shore enemies. What to do to counter this litany of disasters? He insists we need a policy to address each of them.

Posner analyses the various challenges to continued human existence. For each threat there is a "risk assessment" examining the probabilities of its occurring. From the assessment, there is a "cost-benefit" calculation to determine how much to spend to prevent the catastrophe. How likely is the impact of another asteroid extinguishing much or all of human life? How much need we spend to deflect it? What is the true cost of the Kyoto protocol? Posner puts dollar values on each of these in terms of likelihood of the event transpiring and the cost of countering it.

Significantly, Posner posits the threats and their solutions to his countrymen. These are "American" problems and must be dealt with in an "American" environment. He patronisingly grants some UN agency involvement on a few issues, but these are limited to areas the UN is already dealing with or ones the USA has disdained. The British pre-emption of interest in rogue asteroid is given a nod, then passed over.
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