The End of the World

The New York Times is thinking about the end of the world. Peter Singer reviews Richard A. Posner's new book, "Catastrophe". A curious study of risk assessment, the book argues that each risk should be analyzed and money allocated by society according to the present value of the risk, a pretty basic economic concept. I would disagree: money should be devoted to the most cost-effective methods of societal preservation. That may mean that some things are simply not addressed, but if carried through correctly will yield the best possible result.

Elsewhere, op-ed contributor Jared Diamond makes a complete fool of himself in a four-page analysis of societal destruction. He begins by noting, "History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly." You can just smell another discussion of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, right? Nope. Diamond's "powerful societies" include a selection of Polynesian islands, Greenland, Iceland, New Guinea, and Tokugawan Japan. Wow. We must act now to avoid the fate of the Greenlanders!

By contrast with Diamond's examples, which are mainly isolated island nations, truly powerful societies decline very slowly. The Hellenic empires after Alexander lasted a few hundred years. Rome declined for centuries before it fell. Who can put their finger on the collapse of the Mongol civilization? The Ottomans were way overdue by the time World War I broke them up. Doesn't recent history show us that great civilizations can actually survive catastrophic defeat, for example Japan through the Second World War or the U.S. through the Great Depression? If and when the U.S. is destroyed it will be by either (a) nuclear holocaust, or (b) long, slow decline over decades if not centuries.