Cyreenik Says
This 31 Mar 11 Economist article, Broken Links, talks about the similarities between the economic meltdown of 2008 and the supply chain meltdown caused by Japan's quadruple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, nuclear disaster and power shortages.
There are a lot of similarities. Both are big, both are unexpected and both have been "contagious" -- spreading problems far and wide around the world and into surprising places.
What is different is the call for politicians to do something. In the case of the financial meltdown there have been steady calls for more regulations to keep this kind of meltdown from happening again. In the case of nuclear we are once more off-the-charts. In the case of the supply chain meltdown it's being reported by the media but this has not produced any political uproar asking that government enact regulations to fix this problem.
The difference is... The Curse of Being Important. Many people feel on an emotional level that finance is something that needs to be meddled in, while few people feel that way about supply chain.
This is good... for supply chain. It can react quickly to this issue and get things back to normal, and it doesn't face a lot of social uncertainty in doing so.
But, this could change in the future. One example of such a change is how the auto industry was transformed in the 1960's by the auto safety movement symbolized by Ralph Nader and his 1965 book "Unsafe at Any Speed". Before then the auto industry answered mostly to customers. After the auto safety movement gained force it suffered dearly from The Curse and had to answer to stiffer and stiffer state and federal regulation as well.
Supply chain is currently a good example of what happens when The Curse is small -- things can happen quickly and the response can be to address marketplace issues, not marketplace... plus a whole lot of other people with a whole lot of other agendas.
On 11 Mar 11 Japan was hit with its largest earthquake in recorded history. That was immediately followed by its largest tsunami in recorded history. The tragedy is immense and the videos of waves of water carrying all before them will be impressive for the next century.
The good news is Japan is a well developed nation, and well aware of the power of earthquakes -- these people are as prepared as any on earth. The second piece of good news is that the earthquake struck well north of Tokyo, the center of Japan on many levels. This means that the full resources of this well developed nation are available to alleviate suffering and speed recovery. This is not a repeat of Haiti.
The panic news -- news that interests Cyreenik -- is... NUCLEAR IS INVOLVED! GAAA! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!
Yes, fellow Earth citizens, numerous reactions to this incident are showing us that the primal fear of things nuclear is still very much alive and well. Godzilla can come back again, and not get laughed at any more than back in 1954.
...Why is this so? Why is "I survived Three Mile Island" such an underappreciated joke?
If you look at the death toll due to nuclear compared to the death toll caused by any other form of natural or technological disaster, it makes no sense. There has been only one time over ten thousand people have died from a nuclear incident -- the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. This was wartime, and the combined death tolls there were a quarter of those that died at the Battle of Berlin four months earlier (1.2 million). Who freaks out about the Battle of Berlin? All other death tolls from nuclear incidents have been typically under a hundred directly related to the incident and under a thousand due to release of radioactivity.
Compare this to the hundreds of deaths that are routine for weather disasters, thousands of deaths that are routine for big earthquakes, and tens of thousands that are routine for disease and famines... why is there any excitement at all over nuclear?
And while the real numbers are grounds for head-scratching, the urban legend numbers are even more so. There are people today who will swear up and down that a million people died at Chernobyl in 1986. An example of this is this video by Helen Caldicott. (Here are some known numbers: 31 workers died combatting the accident and there were 64 confirmed cases of radiation death.)
My theory is that the root of this hyperconcern is technological hubris -- death by technology is new and unfamiliar to humans. Wars, weather, earthquakes, disease and famine are disasters humans have lived with since prehistory. Nuclear, on the other hand, is new. This same awe of technology can perhaps explain why the 1910 Titanic and 1937 Hindenberg disasters remain memorable while the 2003 Bam earthquake in Iran is an, "Eh?"
This is important because panic leads easily to blunder. The nuclear industry has already had to live with heaping helpings of blunder, and if we don't keep our cool-heads about us, more is going to be heaped on as this incident evolves.
Keep cool, fellow citizens, Godzilla is just a movie monster... OK, a mega-movie monster. He has starred in over 28 movies and his end is not yet in sight.
Update: This is a 16 Mar 11 editorial, The Future of Nukes, and of Japan by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., pointing out the big picture: that the devastation and pollution caused by the tsunami are a million times greater in impact than anything caused by the nuclear rectors.
Update: This 25 Mar 11 editorial, Let Japan Be Land of the Rising Yen by Geoffrey Wood, describes more earthquake panic madness -- in this case not letting the yen rise in value "because this rise is being caused by speculators". Japan has a lot it needs to buy to recover from the disaster, and because of reduced output relative to demand Japan's goods are more in demand so the prices should rise. For both of these reasons a rise in the yen's value is a good thing.
Update: This 23 Apr 11 article is a good one on why nuke is nice, Why I Still Support Nuclear Power, Even After Fukushima by William Tucker.
Update: The panic isn't over yet. This 30 May 11 Huffington Post article, Germany Nuclear Power Plants To Be Entirely Shut Down By 2022 by Juergen Baetz, describes how the German government has decided to decommission all Germany's nuclear power plans by 2022. Whew! That's a fearsomely expensive choice, but, somehow, the Germans think it is a good one. Godzilla in this 2010's incarnation is stalking the streets of Berlin.
This WSJ 16 Mar editorial, President Warren's Empire, describes another example of panic leading to blunder. In this case the panic was the 2008 financial meltdown and the blunder was trying to fix consumer credit by setting up a protection agency, but not defining much about it. The editorial points out that this agency is going to be rolling in dough, but not accountability.
Watch as this agency becomes more and more delusional -- out of touch with market reality. Big surprises are coming up here, but they won't be pleasant ones for the consumers who are about to be... protected.
This thought was brought to mind by a 12 Mar 11 WSJ editorial, The Man Who Defined Deviancy Up by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., about James Q. Wilson whom Jenkins calls "America's greatest thinker on crime, punishment and social order." Wilson is famous for the concept of Broken Windows which comes from an anecdote in which a car was parked in a New York neighborhood and not bothered for many days, until the researcher who put it there broke one of the windows. Then it was vandalized within short order.
"Out of this," says Mr. Wilson, "we coined the phrase 'broken windows,' suggesting public order is a fragile thing, and if you don't fix the first broken window, soon all the windows will be broken."
As Mr. Wilson tells it: "We interviewed several police chiefs and they laughed at the idea. [that increasing foot patrols in a community would reduce the crime rate.] 'It's absurd,' they said. We did the experiment. George Kelling ran it. And we found that the police chiefs were exactly right. It didn't drive down the crime rate—but the people loved it. It reintroduced a sense of order. It gave them a sense that the police and the good guys were in control of their neighborhood."
Through the Cyreenik prism what is being described here is increasing enfranchisement. The community was happier because people were feeling more in control. The key in these series of incidents is the feeling of enfranchisement on the part of community members.
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