"Recent events have shown how little safety margin, or redundancy, exists in our systems. ... In each case, the causes are different and complex, but an overarching theme emerges: We either did not invest enough in public infrastructure, or naively relied on the private sector to provide a public good.

The problem, of course, runs much deeper than isolated crises. Consider that in its 2005 Report Card for America's Infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers surveyed 15 infrastructure categories -- including roads, bridges, drinking water and public schools -- and issued an overall grade of "D." The report notes that "congested highways, overflowing sewers and corroding bridges are constant reminders of the looming crisis that jeopardizes our nation's prosperity and our quality of life." Not to mention crises in public hospitals and housing.

... cost-benefit analysis, at least as practiced today, typically suffers from three fundamental flaws. First, cost is much easier to measure than benefit; as a consequence, new research is showing that benefits are undervalued, leading to underinvestment. ... Second, despite a veneer of certainty, such analyses are typically done by politicians and economists, who too often bring ideological bias. They are best left to scientists and engineers. (I.e., technocracy) ... Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, cost-benefit analysis should only be one input into public policy."

"Is there a thread that ties engineers to Islamic terrorism?

There certainly is, according to Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog at Oxford University, who recently published a paper titled, "Engineers of Jihad." The authors call the link to terrorism "the engineer's mindset."

The sociology paper published last November, which has been making rounds over the Internet and was recently picked up by The Atlantic, uses illustrative statistics and qualitative data to conclude that there is a strong relationship between an engineering background and involvement in a variety of Islamic terrorist groups. The authors have found that graduates in subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world. The authors also note that engineers, alone, are strongly over-represented among graduates who gravitate to violent groups.

However, contrary to popular speculation, it's not technical skills that make engineers attractive recruits to radical groups. Rather, the authors pose the hypothesis that "engineers have a 'mindset' that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism," which becomes explosive when fused by the repression and vigorous radicalization triggered by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries. ...

A past survey in the United States has already shown that the proportion of engineers who declare themselves to be on the right of the political spectrum is greater than any other disciplinary groups--such as economists, doctors, scientists, and those in the humanities and social sciences. ...

Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, they pointed out that a disproportionate share of engineers seem to have a mindset that makes them open to the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" (why argue where there is one best solution) and by "simplism" (if only people were rational, remedies would be simple)."

(Re) "a recent piece by Walter Russell Mead, "Sun Tzu: The Enemy of the Bureaucratic Mind". (Reilly's link wasn't working for me and I've provided one that is.) I would quarrel somewhat with Mead's interpretation of Sun Tzu and his place in Chinese history, but not with these cautionary remarks:

Much of America today is as addicted to bureaucratic, rule based thinking as ancient China. The uncertainties of life in a thermonuclear world haunt us. There must, we feel, be infallible techniques for making the economy grow, keeping inflation at bay, understanding international events and managing American foreign policy. When there is a problem -- a financial crash, a revolution in a friendly country, an attack by hostile forces -- somebody must have made an obvious mistake. They must have misapplied or failed to apply an obvious technique. We would rather believe that our leaders are foolish and incompetent (which they often are) than face the truth that we live in a radically unpredictable world in which no methods and no rules can guarantee safety....' "

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"My predecessor at Bard and the man for whom the chair I hold was named was the writer and editor James Clarke Chace. James always started his courses by telling students that 'Many of your teachers have tried to tell you how the world ought to work. In this class I'm going to teach you about power: about how things actually happen.'

That is a very Sun Tzu thing to say. The Art of War comes out of a culture where political correctness reigned: Confucian China attached enormous importance to ideas of correct conduct and correct speech. To do something in the wrong way was to do the wrong thing. Ethical Chinese scholars rejected concepts like the use of deception in warfare and believed that the aim of politics was to establish a benevolent state under a wise and absolute ruler who would use unlimited power to promote the general good. ...

In Sun Tzu's world, war is the most important thing for the ruler to study. Winning is the most important thing in war. Deception is the way to win. Sun Tzu plays the same role in Confucian China that Machiavelli plays in the Christian west: both writers say that the basic institutions and power arrangements of their society depend on qualities and behavior that can and frequently do violate that society's deepest beliefs and ideals. ...

Some have tried to turn The Art of War into an antiwar classic. It is true that Sun Tzu speaks constantly about the wastefulness of war, and urges kings and generals to avoid fighting whenever possible. The greatest general is the one who wins without fighting, Sun Tzu says piously (and correctly), but then goes on through the rest of his text to give advice to those lesser generals who are forced into war. And that advice is pretty ruthless. There are no tactics and no weapons that Sun Tzu would exclude on moral grounds. ...

The Art of War ... is even more profoundly opposed to the bureaucratic mind: the approach to the world that believes that everything can be reduced to technique and procedures."

"The Financial Collapse of 2008. Before the great implosion, I was aware that systemic financial crises were possible, but I had suffered from the stultifying delusion that the new global economy would correct itself in a rapid cybernetic fashion. This did not happen, and I am not inclined to blame state intervention or crony capitalism to explain it. The Washington Consensus was simply wrong, and something like that Consensus had been common sense for me since the 1970s. Maybe the system could be made to work, but its safe operation seemed to be premised on a degree of prudence and, again, sanity that just was not on offer."

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