If there had been a different president, there wouldn't have been excess mortality in the united states. You do wonder to what extent the of these are kind of over determined,. like the th the titanic iceberg. And you also talked about the ar, the two seven, forty sevens colliding at te tenerif. How do you think about carsaldian in that kind of chain of cazl events?
Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises, and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. In this episode, Michael Shermer speaks with one of the world’s most renowned historians, Niall Ferguson, who explains why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are making us worse, not better, at handling disasters.