The New York Times Magazine has a long article by Michael Lewis about catastrophic risk, covering insurance analyst John Seo. I'm surprised there's no mention of Nassim Taleb and his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (which I have not yet read) about the very subject of forecasting events as unlikely and unpredictable as a hurricane devastating a major city .
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Christine Rosen: “Although it is true that [Christopher] Lasch allowed himself to make sweeping generalizations about the quality of the American character, The Culture of Narcissism has nevertheless remained one of the more useful critiques of late twentieth-century American life and has outlived the feverish criticism it once spawned. The book challenged many of the core assumptions that elites and non-elites blithely accepted as facts at the time: that human beings would continue to devise more sophisticated means of controlling nature and its effects (such as aging) through technology and science, and that these would bring inordinately positive results; that democracies inevitably continue to progress in their development rather than stall or regress; that extremes of individualism and secularism would free people from the supposedly restrictive confines of family, religious, social, and political obligation. Such sentiments were hardly new, of course, but Lasch outlined the weaknesses of them keenly.”
Rosen mostly summarizes Lasch's book, Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, applying it to the 2000s. She argues that Lasch saw Americans taking too seriously their own personal development over development of real character and community, that parents over-schedule their children to the point that they hardly see them anymore, and that Americans growing up either medicated or shielded from pain has led to a risk-averse (or "riskless") society. She's worried that the nature of celebrity has changed to the degree that now with "reality" TV, anybody can be famous and instead of tackling serious issues, the media cover personalities above anything else. Citing increased sizes in suburban homes, she calls the physical separation of family members “a form of domestic learned helplessness”. (Malcolm Gladwell helped popularize learned helplessness, a psychological term expressing the idea that we may know things are bad but irrationally feel unable to change the situation.) Lasch, says Rosen, did now see how narcissistic America would become today with its explosion of distractions and diminution of attention and over-reliance on experts and medication and praise, all counterintuitive to their goal, which is to increase the self-esteem of a nation and its individuals.
James Surowiecki: “By insulating executives from some of the rigors of competition, though, excess cash actually makes failure more likely. It can subvert discipline and encourage waste, much as a trust fund spoils an aimless graduate. History suggests that, the more cash a company has, the more inclined it will be to misuse it. In the late seventies, oil companies found themselves flush with cash as a result of a big spike in oil prices. They dithered, then poured it into exploration projects and acquisitions that brought them headaches and red ink. Similarly, a study of companies that won big legal judgments found that, like gamblers playing with house money, most of them squandered the money on bad bets.”
Sacha: “My general impression is that society is shifting towards a risk-adverse stance. My demographic reason is that the baby boomers, now approaching their retirement ages, are trying to educate their children and grand-children that they shouldn't be doing the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll like they did because it's "bad" for them. The conclusion is that our children must be insulated from all pressures in society, which include bullies and violence, because of course such things don't exist in the real world. Because the baby boomers took stupid risks with their lives - although they got away with it and achieved great achievements - they still thought they could have performed their achievements without the risk. Hence, they conclude that risk is something that must be avoided at all costs, and teach the younger generation to become risk-adverse by choice, not by necessity.”