Richard Posner brings the Chicago school of law and economics perspective to the questions of how to respond to the threat of the sorts of catastrophes that threaten the survival of the human race: big asteroid hits, sudden global warming, terrorist-spawned pandemics and the like. Although remote, such events are possible; even a once-in-a-million-years event could happen tomorrow. There are measures that can be taken to prevent or protect against them. In this book, Professor Posner analyzes the cultural, psychological and economic factors that may explain what action is taken (or not taken).
His analysis may also inform those wrestling with policy decisions regarding less devastating events, such as killer hurricanes, floods and earthquakes.
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He opens with a chapter describing rare but possible scenarios that have elsewhere been described as "extinction events," including natural occurrences such as meteor strikes, man-made accidents such as sudden global warming, and intentional disasters such as bioterror, that could result in millions dead. Having got the attention of most, he points to the scientific work documenting these risks, before turning to the question of why so little is being done to prevent or prepare for them.
Cultural factors are categorized by Posner starting with "scientific illiteracy," what he describes as "the abysmal state of scientific knowledge among nonscientists." (Posner, op cit., p. 93) He points to the low percentages of Americans who can be regarded as scientifically literate, and attributes this to the quality of instruction in the country's schools and colleges, as well as the sheer difficulty of modern science. He finds this shortcoming particularly acute among the legal profession, and maintains that "If political leaders, lawyers, judges, journalists and other members of the governing class have no interest in and feel for science, they are unlikely to attend closely to either the dangers or the opportunities that modern science creates." (Id. p. 96)
Scientific ignorance plays into an unwarranted "worship of science," which Posner sees as contributing to a tendency to "leave science to the scientists" and to count on science to bail humanity out of its worst problems. Posner warns that even smart people skilled at science are not necessarily well equipped to deal effectively with social problems, for which "verbal and social skills, common sense, worldly experience and the ability to evaluate character and to devine motivation may be more important" (Id. p. 100) than those characteristic of scientists.
Science fiction can provide both warning for some and false hopes for others. Posner shares his admiration for classic novels of apocalyptic times as well as modern works including Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake," and the film "The Matrix." Despite his admiration of the works, he concludes that because science fiction "has to season fact with fantasy," on balance, it "probably impedes rather than advances the recognition of the catastrophic risks that endanger us." (Id.)
He goes on to balance the "scientific doomsters," whose dire warnings have been found wrong often enough to be ignored, with the "optimistic backlash" of those on the other side of the doom-optimism spectrum. He closes with the cultural factor of "limited horizons," by which politicians cut their own throat if they propose to raise taxes today to reduce the possibility of catastrophes in the far distant future.
Psychological factors include the human fallacy of seeing "false positives" in otherwise random sequences of events, leading to many false alarms, to the point that "fear of technological hazards has become associated in the sophisticated public's mind with ignoramuses and trial lawyers," (Id. p. 120) requiring leaders to spend time reassuring a panicky populace.
Another is the "economy of attention," the fact that the human brain can stay focused on only so many things at a time. This may justify disregarding the least likely risks, or the most complicated, as distractions from those more immediate or more understandable that face us daily. Events that occur regularly and famously, such as airline crashes, occupy more space in the public's mind than those more deadly but less frequent. In the latter category, Posner discusses the Tunguska event, in which a relatively modest-sized asteroid or comet levelled a forest in Siberia in 1908 with an airburst equivalent to a 10-15 megaton bomb. That was one of the thousands of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) cataloged by scientists in the multi-national Spaceguard project.
Economic factors are those for which Posner has the most famous pedigree, as a leader in the study of law and economics and author of the Foreward to the Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. He opens with a look at the economics of innovation, under which many of the costs of invention, the unintended consequences, are external, falling on those other than the inventor. This tends to make inventors irresponsible, asserts Posner. This means, he submits, that "the market cannot be relied upon to generate the optimal rate and direction of inventive activity." (Id. p. 124). The unpredictability of those costs and benefits makes it equally difficult for government to succeed in guiding inventive activity.
"Global decentralization" adds to the challenge. For example, while the wealthy industrialized countries are the biggest contributors to global warming, the poor countries near the equator are likely to be the principal victims. Yet the latter lack the financial ability to compensate the former for the costs of reducing greenhouse gases. That explains the United States' refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, according to Posner. Similar factors make it impossible to prevent free riding on an asteroid defense funded by the industrialized nations. Yet Posner asserts that reluctance to encourage free riding is not the chief obstacle to an asteroid defense; it is that asteroids are not perceived to be a significant enemy.
Another factor is included in the Public Choice Theory, the body of scholarship "that tries to explain public policy as the outcome of rationally self-interested behavior." (Id. p. 133) He points to his own published analyses that view politicians as "sellers" of policies to "consumers" in a market where the currency is votes. See Posner, "Law, Pragmatism and Democracy", Ch. 5 (2003). He briefly analyzes each of the subject catastrophic scenarios in light of the interest groups likely to support or oppose investment in a remedy, finding few likely to see an advantage in stepping up. He repeatedly returns to the reality that "Having a limited time horizon, politicians prefer policies that yield tangible benefits for constituents in the near term." (Posner, Catastrophe, p. 137). To that, he adds the significant public doubt about the global warming threat, and the inertia of public policy, reminding readers: "Think of how, for many years, even slight scientific uncertainty enabled the tobacco industry to issue plausible denials that smoking was hazardous to health." (Id. p. 138).
In his third chapter, Posner engages in an extended discussion of the merits and methods of cost-benefit analyses, using as test subjects his selected possible catastrophes. He weighs the relative merits of R&D investment in technologies to reduce greenhouse gases and stiff taxes upon emissions that would be "technology forcing" while letting the market decide what technologies provide the most efficient reduction in emissions.
He continues with an extended discussion of the difficult and sensitive process of valuing human life for purposes of cost-benefit analysis. In the course of this analysis, he looks at research into how people consistently under-rate risks that have a very low probability, unless they fall into the category of "dreadful," as have the 9/11 terror deaths. This effect has been labelled "probability neglect" by scholars. Posner suggests that the effect may derive from a cognitive difficulty in thinking about very rare occurrences, interacting with difficulty in thinking about things one has never experienced, ("imagination cost") and the "economy of attention" mentioned earlier.
He comments on the difference between risk and uncertainty with a particular reference to the business of insurance. Risk refers to a probability that can be estimated, and uncertainty to a probability that cannot be estimated. He uses the example of the 9/11 attacks, of which the risk was great but not estimable without data that was unobtainable. About insurance he says that the challenge of deciding on action "is acute in some insurance markets. Insurers determine insurance premiums on the basis of either experience rating * * * or exposure risk, which involves estimating risk on the basis of theory or, more commonly, a combination of theory and limited experience * * * . If a risk cannot be determined by either method, there is uncertainty in the risk-versus-uncertainty sense; and only a gambler, treating uncertainty as a situation of extreme and unknowable variance in possible outcomes, will write insurance when a risk cannot be estimated. Or the government, as with the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 * * *." (Id. p. 172)
He then goes on to discuss possible ways of making cost-benefit analysis work in the face of "radical, nonquantifiable uncertainty." (Id. p. 175) He acknowledges that such tools are of little or no benefit to the business of insurance, because the events treated in the book are those which are uninsurable, due to their high degree of uncertainty and extreme loss potential.
In his fourth and final chapter, Posner proposes means to reduce catastrophic risks, after suggesting that the law and the social sciences are making little contribution to those methods. He first urges movement toward a scientifically literate legal profession, contrasting the reliance of science on objective experiment with the reliance of law upon the adversarial system of advocacy and "intuitive economics." Part of the challenge Posner sees is the court-centricity of the legal profession, which he attributes in part to the lack of interest in science among law professors. "Phenomena that are not the stuff of litigation rarely engage the professional interest of academic lawyers. Science has great prestige in the larger society, none in the academic legal community." (Id. p. 204)
Among his proposals are a "science court" composed of lawyers with a substantial background in one of the physical sciences, a center for catastrophic-risk assessment and response, new regulatory bodies including an international EPA, an international bioweaponry agency, and a catastrophic-risk review of new projects. Among his more controversial discussions are about proposals to limit science study by foreigners, to intensify police measures, including extreme measures such as collective punishment and torture, when justified by needs to prevent intentional man-made mega-catastrophes.
Besides being a prolific author, Richard Posner is the Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He also coauthors, with Gary Becker, "The Becker-Posner Blog", which has recently addressed such contemporary issues as the appropriate government compensation for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Posted by dougsimpson at September 27, 2005 06:37 PM