Fascinating piece here on Science Daily about the findings of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health on factors that delayed the evacuation of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

The study concludes that there are three main issues: how long it takes to start the evacuation, how long it takes to complete the evacuation, and whether (and presumably how badly) people are injured.

In the case of the WTC the process of even beginning the evacuation was delayed by lack of awareness about and experience in evacuation procedures; people making phone calls; checking on colleagues; and concerns about one’s own physical ability to make it down multiple flights of stairs.

Sadly,
> Workers also delayed their evacuation because they were waiting for their supervisor’s permission to leave. The length of time for the entire evacuation process was lengthened by inappropriate footwear; confusion about where the staircases were located and where they terminated; and periodic congestion on stairs. Injuries were associated most often with physical disabilities (i.e., those with physical disabilities were more likely to be injured during the evacuation process).

I recall reading an account of an airline crash where those who survived were those who precisely did NOT heed the safety advices about staying calm and forming an orderly queue for the exit — they simply barged their way to the nearest hole in the plane and jumped out, while those queuing in the prescribed manner were mostly burned to death.

Social mores are, of course, the means by which we all live together in confined urban and social spaces. But it seems that they may have limited applicability in life-or-death situations, and it is those who revert to the id fastest who seem to survive.

The other moral of this story is: Wear sensible shoes to work. I’m not kidding.

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Re Risk goes mystical today.

There’s an interesting assessment of the global economy by Wharton just out. Well, I say, ‘interesting’ but mostly it’s just “bad news…blah blah…worse news…blah blah…marginally less bad news…etc” though it is broken down by regions so you can see how particular lines and territories are being affected (see China — ouch, if you have a poor claims record).

One comment did jump out at me, though, and that was on Japan’s experience from the “Lost Decade”. Basically, Japan has already had a load of experience in dealing with financial hard times after its economy tanked in the early 90s:

Its policy makers tried a variety of fiscal and monetary stimuli that may provide clues to how today’s global economic leaders should approach the current problems

Wharton management lecturer Adrian Tschoegl worked for six years as a macroeconomist at a Tokyo investment bank during that country’s economic rise and fall. “That’s when I realized that most forecasts of complex political and economic events are valueless,” says Tschoegl. He says he made some good calls and some bad calls when he was working in Japan, but came to believe that in today’s complex, interrelated global economic system, it is nearly impossible to predict the true impact of one policy action or another.

“We can come up with some ideas and a range of forecasts and some information about the risk of what is out there,” he says, “but the reality is that all sorts of things can come out of nowhere and suddenly hit you.”

When governments attempt to enact policies to respond to economic problems, it is hard to tell what will happen one or two steps forward as policies and market forces begin to interact, he adds.

“The problem is that very often the best thing to do is to simply not do anything,” says Tschoegl. “But no politicians can bring themselves to stand up here and say, ‘We don’t have the faintest idea of what to do, and right now we’re not going to do a damn thing.’” [emphasis added]

I don’t want to go all philosophical on you but that’s pretty much a Taoist approach to managing the economy.

Wu wei (无为) is the notion of non-over-interference, or letting things run themselves, i.e. creating general policies and direction, but not micromanaging. You can get a sense of it in risk management terms in considering the fairly recent notion that aggressively cleaning up oil spills may not be the best way to deal with them; just letting them disperse naturally is often less harmful to the environment. And I recall that in the aftermath of the Great Hurricane of 1987 more damage was done to trees by the clean-up operation than by the storm itself — had they just left many of them alone they would have survived perfectly well, if a little bashed.

Actually, there’s nothing mystical about this at all. Taoism is very hard-headed about the practicalities of government, and on one level both the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang-tzu books can be seen as instruction manuals for how to govern countries.

But I agree with Tschoegl – we’re unlikely to see any politician adopting Lao Tzu’s advice right now. Which is a pity.

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