Meta: Too big to fail

Submitted by James on Tue, 08/23/2011 - 5:24pm

Not good.

Cramming more than half the world's population and production onto a relatively small area of mostly coastal land means that the cost of natural catastrophes of all kinds will rise dramatically. This year's earthquake in Japan, which caused more than $300 billion in economic damage, was just a preview; a decade and a half from now, a single hurricane or earthquake will come with a potential price tag of $1 trillion or more. Imagine a world in which economic damage equivalent to that caused by a major war or the detonation of a midsized nuclear weapon in a major city could materialize with a warning of only a few days (in the case of a hurricane) or just one second (an earthquake).

And then there's really big: China stalls, as does India.

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Great article

Submitted by scharrison on Tue, 08/23/2011 - 9:14pm.

Thanks for posting this, James. This part really rings true:

Now that we are building megacities of financial risk, we need to put the equivalent of new building practices and fire codes in place to keep an ill-timed and poorly placed financial fire from burning down a third of the metropolis.

We did the exact opposite, which is what has brought the world to its knees. And we still haven't fixed it.