The Challenger Disaster

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In most complex undertakings, there's a sort of bureaucratic vulnerability. We tend to want to pin the blame on the person at the top. The operational failure is usually due to some other form of rather prosaic mistake made by middle management. So it's not the people at the top, nor is it necessariy the people at the sharp end. And you can't blame the titanic on the people who were actually in command of the vessel at that moment.

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.