The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (review)

This is not a book to read at the end of a long day: you won’t sleep well. Charles Perrow has drawn upon decades of research documenting the ways bureaucracies, public and private, fail the constituencies they are ostensibly designed, to borrow a current law enforcement gloss, “to serve and protect.” Perrow is presented with some easy targets, most notably FEMA, but this is not a book based upon easy targets or cheap shots. Perrow is after deeper structural explanations for why the governmental agencies which have been constituted to protect the public interest have so often failed, sometimes colossally.

To his credit, Perrow doesn’t dwell on the inevitable, albeit regrettable, fact that presidents, in our system, have to appoint people to whom, in one way or another, they are indebted. That said, there is still considerable latitude – even at the high end of those to whom a president (or governor or mayor) is indebted, there is a range of competencies from which an executive can choose. President Bill Clinton chose a “crony,” James Lee Witt, to head FEMA. Witt was more than a “friend from Arkansas.” He was a committed and capable administrator who clearly believed that the federal government could play a positive role, a belief President Clinton shared. By contrast – and the contrast is stark, as Perrow makes abundantly clear – the appointments the Bush/Cheney administration have made were cronies who shared their conviction that the government had no useful or constructive role to play in securing the commonweal apart from vanquishing mostly imagined enemies. They appointed people who shared their contempt for regulating the private sector and providing services to those in need.

Perrow is thorough-going in making this juxtaposition clear but, curiously, attributes the difference between the two administrations to a combination of largely impersonal forces: the failure of regulation in an “era of downsizing” and the “prosaic” failures of organization, by which I take it he means our all too common human foibles. The latter is, presumably, congenital – we can’t ever get what we want/need. The former would seem to come from some source other than “prosaic.” But the closest we come to understanding the origins of the “era of downsizing” is Perrow’s stipulation of industrial concentration. This is, of course, not exactly a revelation. Public agencies have long been co-opted by those they were supposed to regulate. The only exceptions to this that I know of, are the agencies designed to administer to the “needy.”

Perrow amply describes the failure of governmental agencies to anticipate, plan for and effectively respond to a whole series of very serious threats to our well being, if not to our very survival. But as just noted, he does not make clear whether this is a structural problem particular to our social, economic and political “arrangement,” or a problem of “modernity,” for which responsibility is diffuse. For example, in the opening two chapters of The Next Catastrophe, Perrow is at pains to show how we have set ourselves up for vulnerability to calamity, either at the hands of terrorists, natural forces, or human error. The “villain” is concentration of “assets” like chemical production and storage facilities, nuclear power plants, and our electrical and internet grids, which are, Perrow argues, sitting ducks. I can only agree. But having agreed, I have to ask myself were the ports, the electric grid, or the internet conceived with the perils that now arguably warrant being thought of as the “next catastrophe” in mind? Obviously not. For a very long time, centralization was regarded as the epitome of rational organization and efficiency. Vulnerability to breakdown of systems, much less terrorism, was not an issue.

For all the merits of The Next Catastrophe, it is disappointing that Perrow does not engage with Ulrich Beck’s theorizing about the “risk society” and the critical commentary to which Beck’s work has...