The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters

This short, well-written book uses vivid stories from hurricanes, earthquakes, fires and floods to show the mental biases that keep us from preparing for disasters, even disasters we know are coming. The authors apply “Kahneman and Tversky” psychology to improve our behavior.While most of the examples in this book come from natural disasters, these mental errors contribute to many low probability but high consequence catastrophes. I couldn’t help but think about errors investors make in the stock market. Myopia: focusing on too short a time horizon; Amnesia: forgetting lessons of past disasters; Herding!The second half of the book offers strategies to overcome these biases, but this area needs more work. The authors present a framework for a behavioral risk audit and describe preparedness plans that take our natural biases into account. I wish they had more examples of successful preparation to share. If planners read this book, maybe those will come.

The Ostrich Paradox (2017) by Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther looks at why the authors believe people are so poor at handling disastrous risks. Meyer is a professor of marketing at Wharton and Kenreuther is a professor of decision making also at Wharton.The book uses a framework of Kahneman and Tversky’s idea of how we think fast and slow, with instinctive reasoning and then with better thought out slower reasoning as well. Meyer suggests that when things go badly we think fast but not well and provides a few examples of this, with the pilots of Air France flight 447 that crashed in the Atlantic and examples of people getting into trouble fleeing hurricanes.Meyer suggests six reasons why people don’t prepare enough. They are myopia on short term benefits, Amnesia by forgetting about fairy recent history, over optimism, inertia, simplification and herding.The book then concentrates on US hurricanes and their impact.Unfortunately the book doesn’t look at trends in deaths globally from natural disasters. Nor does it mention how much safer air travel has become. Also, no mention is made of US laws that effectively shift much of the risk on to the government with repeated bail outs of home owners with property which is known to be high risk.The book is topical with the outbreak of Covid 19 across the world. However, while undoubtedly people haven’t been well prepared some countries, notably Australia, South Korea and New Zealand have handled the outbreak much better than others. This would suggest that good institutions are able to handle disasters much better. However Australia’s recent poor handling of fire risk would indicate that the same government can sometimes handle one crisis well and another poorly.The Ostrich Paradox isn’t a bad book. It’s impressively short and is worth the time to read it. But in part by being so short and trying to fit many events into the same framework quite a few things are missed.

This book does a great job of addressing individual cognitive biases that take place when it comes to implementing preventive measures against disasters. The book also does a great job of presenting some practical ideas how we can individually and collectively improve our decision making when it comes to implementing preventive measures. If you are in the field of emergency management, disaster recovery, and even local govern,ent, I highly recommend this book.

A lot of usable material. I am on my third listen, so i can take notes.

OK, but it relies heavily on government regulations as a basis for preparation for disasters rather than individual responsibility.

I enjoyed this book and although I don’t agree with a small portion I learned a lot from it. I took notes to help me remember important points.

A sobering read. Fascinating ideas being propounded .

Good information for reference to become prepared for any expectations that may happen.

An explanation of the reasons why we make the wrong decisions and what we can do about it.

A companion gift for my friend

è un ottima lettura per approfondire aspetti cognitivi riguardanti i bias che intervengono contro le assicurazioni contro i danni. Il libro è ben fatto, chiaro e di facile comprensione, a tratti quasi divertente; ma aiuta molto a riflettere!