This week's The Economist draws attention to a disturbing weakness in modern governance: our persistent tendency to underestimate catastrophic risks. The two articles linked above examine threats capable of causing disruption on an extraordinary scale, including powerful coronal mass ejections similar to or stronger than the Carrington Event of 1859. A sufficiently severe solar storm could damage electrical infrastructure across large areas of the planet, potentially leaving societies without reliable grid electricity for months or longer.
Such risks cannot simply be dismissed as remote possibilities. Some estimates discussed by The Economist place the probability of a major solar event occurring during this century at greater than 50:50. Yet governments remain naturally focused on electoral cycles and immediate demands, while preparing for events that may occur decades from now offers few visible political rewards.
The second article broadens the discussion to catastrophic and existential risks, an area closely associated with Nick Bostrom, previously mentioned on this blog. Particularly relevant is David Manheim's recent open-access paper, “The Fragile World Hypothesis: Complexity, Fragility, and Systemic Existential Risk,” published in Futures, which examines how increasing technological and societal complexity may create systemic vulnerabilities capable of producing cascading failures.
There is, however, a more uncomfortable question, can governments alone be blamed when academia may exhibit a similar hierarchy of attention? A Scopus search conducted at the time produced 6,733 documents containing “catastrophe” in their titles, compared with 11,955 containing “fashion.” Such a crude comparison obviously cannot establish the relative social value of research fields, but the contrast remains provocative.
