The case against crisis-mongering
What I would more like is The Case for Resilience.<p>We have a crisis every so often. As a society, we ought to be able to survive it. That might be a pandemic, war, climate change (whether man-made, or from a volcano&#x2F;asteroid&#x2F;etc.), nukes, or what-not.<p>Being resilient means:<p>* Some level of economic isolation. Each region ought to be able to produce the bare necessities for themselves, and supply chains shouldn&#x27;t be brittle. This has less economic impact than one might predict, since limiting the flow of some goods doesn&#x27;t limit the flow of information, and the limits can be pretty mild.<p>* Some level of excess capacity. Free market capitalism wants everything to be just-in-time and as close to 100% capacity as possible. Machines sitting around idle are bad. Resilience demands we can quickly reallocate resources in response to change.<p>* Having some amount of stuff stockpiled, be that N95 masks or food.<p>* Having something like FEMA or the military, only competent.<p>* Proactively addressing potential threats. If something has a 5% chance of wiping out mankind or sending us back to the stone age, we should deal with it. We only get an expected 20 tries.<p>I don&#x27;t believe a lot of the climate change predictions. I don&#x27;t think we have any idea as to what will happen; it&#x27;s a chaotic system. Academic incentive structures don&#x27;t support honest publications either. Things may turn out far better, worse, or most likely, just different than predicted, and reasonable people can disagree.<p>I think if we can agree to aggressively and proactively deal with potential threats, though, exact estimates on odds of all of those outcomes don&#x27;t matter so much. And if we can deal with those 5%-odds threats, the need for fear-mongering goes away.