The NY Times is out with a story today chronicling all the warnings about Gotham's vulnerability to storms and flooding.
Loss of life and economic devastation are made all the more tragic when we realize that these losses were at least in part preventable.
But as an anonymous source close the New York government officials put it:
As Nassim Taleb, et al have written about, there are deep psychological and evolutionary roots to our species' tendency to ignore seemingly low probability, catastrophic events until it is too late.
Perhaps as the human species was evolving and facing a daily battle for survival there was a prohibitive cost to planning too far into the future. Now, however, with the hunting/foraging days long gone for most of us, we're still stuck traveling through life with the same 'Cave Man software' of our forefathers.
With Mother Nature having reminded us what she's capable of there will likely be some changes to storm protection systems along the East Coast. But unfortunately I'm not terribly optimistic that we can extrapolate the lessons of Sandy to other systemic risks, such as asteroid collision, climate change, and number one focus of this blog, financial crises.
Sadly, the Cave Man is still in charge of this joint.
Loss of life and economic devastation are made all the more tragic when we realize that these losses were at least in part preventable.
But as an anonymous source close the New York government officials put it:
"until things happen, people aren’t willing to pay for it".Indeed.
As Nassim Taleb, et al have written about, there are deep psychological and evolutionary roots to our species' tendency to ignore seemingly low probability, catastrophic events until it is too late.
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| Explain this 'insurance' thing to me one more time? |
With Mother Nature having reminded us what she's capable of there will likely be some changes to storm protection systems along the East Coast. But unfortunately I'm not terribly optimistic that we can extrapolate the lessons of Sandy to other systemic risks, such as asteroid collision, climate change, and number one focus of this blog, financial crises.
Sadly, the Cave Man is still in charge of this joint.
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