Catastrophic Incentives: Why Our Approaches to Disasters Keep Falling Short

by Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, Ellen Carlin

Societies are vulnerable to any number of potential earthquakes, hurricanes, infectious diseases, terrorist attacks, and many others. Even though the dangers are often clear, there is a persistent pattern of inadequate preparation and a failure to learn from experience. Before disasters, institutions pay insufficient attention to risk; in the aftermath, even when the lack of preparation led to a flawed response, the focus shifts to patching holes instead of addressing the underlying problems.

Examining twenty years of disasters from 9/11 to COVID-19, Jeff Schlegelmilch and Ellen Carlin show how flawed incentive structures make the world more vulnerable when catastrophe strikes. They explore how governments, the private sector, nonprofits, and academia behave before, during, and after crises, arguing that standard operational and business models have produced dysfunction. Catastrophic Incentives reveals troubling patterns about what does and does not matter to the institutions that are responsible for dealing with disasters. The short-termism of electoral politics and corporate decision making, the funding structure of nonprofits, and the institutional dynamics shaping academic research have all contributed to a failure to build resilience.

Offering a comprehensive and incisive look at disaster governance, Catastrophic Incentives provides timely recommendations for reimagining systems and institutions so that they are better equipped to manage twenty-first-century threats.

Genres: Nonfiction

264 pages, Paperback

Published October 3, 2023

Reviews

[Sean Carlin]

"We live in a modern world that has the illusion of stability and the reality of fragility. We have a tendency to ignore signs of instability as we move through the routines of the world we have created."

Catastrophic Incentives is an excellent, indispensable history of disasters in the 21st century (9/11, Hurricane Katrina, COVID-19); an overview of the systems and institutions (governmental, academic, philanthropic, corporate) that have been engaged to deal with and respond to such calamities; and a dispassionate analysis of the political, economic, and even biological reasons we are inclined to react to crises rather than work proactively to prevent (or at least mitigate) them.

A richly researched book, the authors keep its trove of information from becoming inaccessible or overwhelming to general readers by presenting it in easily digestible subsections. Catastrophic Incentives is not a polemic; it's a prescriptive manual for finding a more resilient, more equitable way forward through the unprecedented challenges of the new millennium. Highly recommended.

[Steve]

I enjoyed this book. I had frequently noted that governments were much better at responding to catastrophes than preventing them and I had developed my own hypotheses. It was nice to read Schlegelmilch’s and Carlin’s more structured analysis, written in plain language. Although the tone of the book seems to make the book targeted more for professionals in the area of disasters, I found the book to be very accessible. I think this is an important book and should be widely read by people interested in current events. Thank you to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for the digital review copy.

[Jeff]

Thorough Examination Of The Field. This is a look at the history of disaster response (mostly in the US, and primarily over the last 50 some odd years) and the incentive structures of the various players in the field - and what those incentive structures lead to, for good and bad. It also has a few recommendations on how to move forward, as most books of this type do, though as with most all recommendations of most all books of this type, these very much come down to a Your Mileage May Vary situation. Though I do appreciate that the authors are realists and openly acknowledge that some would be easier to achieve than others, and some of the recommendations are about as close to "never going to happen" as anything ever truly gets. At 34% documentation, it is even on the high side of average in my experience - which is always a plus. Overall a solid and informative look at a lot of aspects of disaster response - and particularly disaster response coordination - that most even within the field probably aren't fully aware of, and for this alone it is absolutely essential reading for anyone who may ever experience a disaster. Which is everyone, everywhere. Very much recommended.