quinta-feira, 2 de julho de 2020

The Economist__The next catastrophe (and how to survive it)



The big theme of this week´s edition of The Economist concerns the fact governments are addicted to ignore the risks of catastrophes. The article on the first link above focuses on several possible catastrophes like for instance coronal mass ejection (like the one that took place in 1959 or even worse) that can put large parts of the Planet for months or even years "without reliable grid electricity". 

An event whose chances of happening this century are put by some at better than 50:50. The second article in the link above, on the other hand, talks among other things about the work of Nick Bostrom, which was already mentioned in this blog several months ago, and whose hypothesis was analyzed recently in an open-access article published in the journal Futures by David Manheim.

The ironic part is that governments are not the only ones to be blamed because a search in Scopus database for publications having the term "catastrophe" in the title returns 6733 documents while if one searches for the word "fashion" then 11955 documents can be found. 

Does this result mean that the Academy, is less concerned with catastrophes than with fashion or that the fashion industry (and other industries such as luxury, which Scopus reports is also mentioned in thousands of publications) subverted the priorities of Academia ?