The Next Catastrophe

Is America ready for the next September 11 or Hurricane Katrina? Is our nation really safer now than it was when Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center towers? Have the billions of dollars we spent on Homeland Security prepared our industrial and financial systems for real shocks? Have we even managed to identify what the real threats to our society actually are?

Charles Perrow is one of America’s preeminent experts on disasters and disaster preparedness, and his deeply disturbing answer to these questions is a resounding NO. In his new book, The Next Catastrophe, Perrow details how our politicians routinely transform human disasters into opportunities for profiteering and politicking. According to Perrow, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale, even the most well-meaning of efforts tend to result in wasteful and counterproductive bureaucracies rather than in deep reform of vulnerable and fragile systems. Ultimately, Perrow concludes that the most important tactic to significantly reduce the dangers we face is to reduce the size of our most vulnerable targets, and to reorganize our industrial and energy systems to make them more redundant and resilient.

The Next Catastrophe is the latest in a long line of books in which Perrow has examined how humans manage complex and tightly linked systems. These include the seminal work Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, and Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism. Perrow has worked as a consultant with the U.S. military, the White House, and the nuclear-power industry.

Join New America Foundation and Charles Perrow for a provocative, disturbing, but also hopeful look at how Americans perceive, prepare for, and respond to risk, followed by a Q&A session moderated by Barry C. Lynn.

Participants

• Charles Perrow
  Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Yale
  Author, The Next Catastrophe
• Barry Lynn (moderator)
  Senior Fellow
  New America Foundation