My Apocalypse Syllabus
[Below is the latest version of a new course I am developing for the Spring of 2021, inspired by *gestures at all of this.* Some sections — particularly the week on COVID-19 — will be revised over the rest of this calendar year. The basic layout is pretty much set, however. Enjoy!]
OVERVIEW
The world has been coming to an end for some time now. Take your pick of catastrophe: terrorism, financial crisis, nuclear war, cyber-collapse, natural disasters, climate change, or, hey, devastating pandemic. It seems as if the 21st century has been replete with world-defining catastrophes and we are barely a fifth of the way through it.
At the same time, however, it is worth remembering two important contextual notes when thinking about the end times. The first is that the world has ended many times previously. According to Elizabeth Kolbert, we are on our sixth possible extinction. Short of planetary apocalypse, plenty of civilizations have collapsed in the past. Even when catastrophes strike, like the Black Death or the 1918/19 Great Influenza, civilization adapts and overcomes.
The second is that the apocalypse has been overpredicted in human history. Parson Malthus predicted a demographic time bomb in the mid-nineteenth century. The Club of Rome predicted the depletion of key natural resources in the 1970s. Y2K was supposed to break the Internet on January 1, 2000. Many people embraced the misplaced eschatological beliefs surrounding the Mayan prediction of the end of civilization in December 2012. All we got out of that was a mediocre John Cusack movie.
This course is borne out of covid-19 but focuses on the larger questions the pandemic raises about possible catastrophes and the ability of the world to respond to them. It starts with some theoretical considerations of why societies might not be prepared to cope with looming catastrophes. These include problems of collective action, time discounting, failures to differentiate risk and uncertainty, normal accidents, bureaucratic politics, millenarian beliefs, and the anarchical structure of international politics. It then considers which kinds of societies and polities are better placed to respond to disasters and catastrophes.
The next section considers some of the historical instances in which threats both real and imagined affected the globe, and how they have played out. These threats range from pandemics to famines to nuclear catastrophes to overpopulation to cybercollapse. The third section of the course compares and contrasts the global responses to the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 covid-19 pandemic. The fourth section of the course considers the post-coronavirus threats to the world, from climate change to the renewed possibility of great power war. The final section considers the role that fictional narratives play in thinking about catastrophes.
THE READINGS
Required books
Max Brooks, World War Z (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006).
Daniel W. Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, Revived Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do about It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).
Frank Snowden, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
COURSE OUTLINE
PART ONE: THEORIES OF CATASTROPHE AND PREVENTION
I. An introduction to the apocalypse and why it is worth avoiding (one session)
Rebecca Solnit, “The Uses of Disaster,” Harper’s, October 2005.
Joel Achenbach, “The Century of Disasters,” Slate, May 13, 2011.
Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), chapter one.
Angus Deaton, The Great Escape (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), chapter two.
II. Equilibrium, disequilibrium, and catastrophe (one session)
Fritz Machlup, “Equilibrium and Disequilibrium: Misplaced Concreteness and Disguised Politics.” Economic Journal 68 (March 1958): 1–24.
Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), prologue and chapter one.
Goldin and Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect, introduction and chapter one.
Peter Kareiva and Emma Fuller, “Beyond Resilience: How to Better Prepare for the Profound Disruption of the Anthropocene.” Global Policy 7 (May 2016): 107–118.
III. Complexity, systemic risk, and normal accidents (one session)
Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents (New York: Basic Books, 1984), selected excerpts.
Sergey Buldyrev et al, “Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks,” Nature 464 (April 2010): 1025–1028.
Dirk Helbing, “Globally networked risks and how to respond,” Nature 497 (2 May 2013): 51–59.
Miguel Centeno et al, “The Emergence of Global Systemic Risk,” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (2015): 65–85.
Jean-Christophe Le Coze, “1984–2014. Normal Accidents. Was Charles Perrow Right for the Wrong Reasons?” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 23 (December 2015): 275–286.
II. First image issues: catastrophe and the individual (one session)
Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, 1–10, 121–130.
Philip Tetlock, “Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (July 2003): 320–324.
Bruce Tonn, “Beliefs about human extinction,” Futures 41 (December 2009): 766–773.
Kai Ruggeri, Sonia Ali, and Tomas Folke, “Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk,” Nature Human Behavior 4 (June 2020): 622–633.
Andrew McGill and Beatrice Jin, “What’s safe to do during a pandemic? We polled America.” Politico, May 29, 2020.
III. Fictional narratives and thinking the unthinkable (one session)
Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, 11–37.
Daniel W. Drezner, “Metaphor of the Living Dead: Or, the Effect of the Zombie Apocalypse on Public Policy Discourse.” Social Research 81 (Winter 2014): 825–849.
J. Furman Daniel III and Paul Musgrave, “Synthetic Experiences: How Popular Culture Matters for Images of International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly 61 (Fall 2017): 503–516.
Charli Carpenter and Kevin Young, “Does Science Fiction Affect Political Fact? Yes and No: A Survey Experiment on ‘Killer Robots,’” International Studies Quarterly 62 (September 2018): 562–576.
Kevin Bankston, “How Sci-Fi Like WarGames Led to Real Policy During the Reagan Administration,” Slate, October 8, 2018.
II. Experts and masses (two sessions)
Snowden, Epidemics and Society, chapters 2, 10–12, 17.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Avital Pilpel, “Epistemology and risk management,” Risk & Regulation 13 (2007): 6–7.
Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, D. Alex Hughes and David G. Victor, “The Cognitive Revolution and the Political Psychology of Elite Decision Making,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (June 2013): 368–386.
David Lazer et al, “The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis.” Science 343 (14 March 2014): 1203–1205.
Susan Rose-Ackerman, “The Limits of Cost/Benefit Analysis When Disasters Loom,” Global Policy 7 (May 2016): 56–66.
Jonathan Wiener, “The Tragedy of the Uncommons: On the Politics of Apocalypse,” Global Policy 7 (May 2016): 67–80.
Elizabeth Saunders and Alexandra Guisinger, “Mapping the Boundaries of Elite Cues: How Elites Shape Mass Opinion across International Issues,” International Studies Quarterly 61 (June 2017): 425–441.
Scott Clifford and Jennifer Jerit. “Disgust, anxiety, and political learning in the face of threat.” American Journal of Political Science 62 (April 2018): 266–279.
Isaac Chotiner, “The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory that Informed the Trump Administration,” The New Yorker, March 30, 2020.
III. The second image: disaster and the Weberian state (two sessions)
Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, 95–120.
Goldin and Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect, chapter 7.
Ilan Noy, “The macroeconomic consequences of disasters,” Journal of Development Economics 88 (March 2009): 221–231.
Amy B. Zegart, “September 11 and the Adaptation Failure of US Intelligence Agencies,” International Security 29 (Spring 2005): 78–111.
Andrew Healy and Neil Mahotra, “Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy,” American Political Science Review 103 (August 2009): 387–406.
Simon Wigley and Arzu Akkoyunlu-Wigley, “The impact of regime type on health: does redistribution explain everything?” World Politics 63 (October 2011): 647–677.
Daniel P. Aldrich and Michelle A. Meyer, “Social Capital and Community Resilience,” American Behavioral Scientist 59 (February 2015): 254–269.
Cevat Giray Aksoy, Barry Eichengreen, and Orkun Saka, “The Political Scar of Epidemics,” NBER Working Paper №27401, June 2020.
IV. Anarchy and the dilemmas of global collective action (two sessions)
Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, pp. 25–94.
Goldin and Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect, chapter 8.
Peter Haas, “Banning Chlorofluorocarbons: Epistemic community efforts to protect stratospheric ozone,” International Organization 46 (January 1992): 187–224.
Elinor Ostrom, “Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (Summer 2000): 137–158.
Todd Sandler, “Strategic Aspects of Difficult Global Challenges,” Global Policy 7 (May 2016): 45–55.
Scott Barrett, “Collective Action to Avoid Catastrophe: When Countries Succeed, When They Fail, and Why.” Global Policy 7 (May 2016): 45–55.
Victor Galaz et al, “Global Governance Dimensions of Globally Networked Risks: The State of the Art in Social Science Research.” Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy 8 (March 2017): 4–27.
PART TWO: A HISTORY OF THE ENDS OF THE WORLD
VI. Pandemics (two sessions)
Snowden, Epidemics and Society, chapters 4–9, 13, 19–21.
Goldin and Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect, chapter six.
Richard Neustadt and Harvey Fineberg, The Epidemic that Never Was: Policy-Making and the Swine Flu Scare (New York: Vintage, 1983), pp. 17–22, 46, 57–59, 95–97, and 105.
Gregory Koblentz, “Biosecurity Reconsidered: Calibrating Biological Threats and Responses.” International Security 34 (Spring 2010): 96–132.
VII. Nuclear war and Armageddon (two sessions)
Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, chapters 6, 9, 12–21,
Scott Sagan. “The perils of proliferation: Organization theory, deterrence theory, and the spread of nuclear weapons,” International Security 18 (Spring 1994): 66–107.
Bradley A. Thayer, “The Risk of Nuclear Inadvertence: A Review Essay,”
Security Studies 3 (Spring 1994): 428–93.
VIII. Overpopulation and resource depletion (one session)
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, chapters 1, 7, 18.
Hennrik Urdal, “People vs. Malthus: Population Pressure, Environmental Degradation, and Armed Conflict Revisited,” Journal of Peace Research 42 (July 2005): 417–434.
Malcolm Weiner, “The Collapse of Civilizations,” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs paper, September 2018.
Ugo Bardi, “Peak oil, 20 years later: Failed prediction or useful insight?” Energy Research & Social Science 48 (February 2019): 257–261.
IX. Cyber (one session)
Goldin and Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect, chapter four
Mark Manion and William Evan, “The Y2K problem and professional responsibility: a retrospective analysis,” Technology and Society 22 (August 2000): 361–387.
Erik Gartzke and Jon Lindsay, “Thermonuclear Cyberwar,” Journal of Cybersecurity 3 (March 2017): 37–48.
Andy Greenberg, “The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History,” Wired, August 22, 2018.
PART THREE: MORE RECENT ENDS OF THE WORLD
X. The 2008 financial crisis (one session)
Michael Lewis, “The End,” Portfolio, December 2008.
Donald Palmer and Michael Maher, “The mortgage meltdown as normal accidental wrongdoing,” Strategic Organization 8 (February 2010): 83–91.
Daniel W. Drezner, “The System Worked: Global Economic Governance during the Great Recession.” World Politics 66 (January 2014): 123–164.
Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking), introduction.
Sarah Bauerle Danzman, Thomas Oatley, and William Winecoff, “All Crises are Global: Capital Cycles in an Imbalanced International Political Economy,” International Studies Quarterly 61 (December 2017): 907–923.
Edwin Truman, “International Coordination of Economic Policies in the Global Financial Crisis,” Peterson Institute for International Economics working paper, July 2019.
XI. Covid-19 (two sessions)
Snowden, Epidemics and Society, chapter 22.
Alex DeWaal, “New Pathogen, Old Politics,” Boston Review, April 3, 2020.
Sarah Kreps and Douglas Kriner, “Good News and Bad News about COVID-19 Misinformation,” Scientific American, June 10, 2020.
James Fallows, “The 3 Weeks That Changed Everything,” The Atlantic, June 29, 2020.
PART FOUR: THE FUTURE END OF THE WORLD
XII. Environmental change (two sessions)
Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, selected chapters.
Goldin and Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect, chapter five.
Jared Diamond, “Twilight at Easter,” New York Review of Books. March 25, 2004.
Scott Page, “Are We Collapsing? A Review of Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” Journal of Economic Literature 43 (December 2005): 1049–1062.
Kyle Harper, “The Environmental Fall of the Roman Empire,” Daedalus 145 (April 2016): 101–111.
XII. Great power war (one session)
John Mueller, “War Has Almost Ceased to Exist: An Assessment,” Political Science Quarterly 124 (Summer 2009): 297–321.
Andrew Krepinevich, “The Eroding Balance of Terror,” Foreign Affairs 98 (January/February 2019): 62–74.
Hans Binnendijk and David Gompert, “Decisive Response: A New Nuclear Strategy for NATO,” Survival 61 (October-November 2019): 113–128.
Michael Tkacik, “Global structural imbalances and the South China Sea: The likelihood of great power war,” Comparative Strategy 39 (January 2020): 70–75.
XIII. Less conventional threats (two sessions)
Economist, “Sui Genocide,” December 17, 1998.
Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO.” Political Theory 36 (August 2008): 607–633.
Joseph F. Coates, “Risks and threats to civilization, humankind, and the earth,” Futures 41 (December 2009): 694–705.
David C. Denkenberger and Robert W. Blair Jr., “Interventions that may prevent or mollify supervolcanic eruptions,” Futures 102 (October 2018): 51–62.
Hin-Yan Liu, Kristian Cedervall Lauta, and Matthijs Michiel Maas, “Governing Boring Apocalypses.” Futures 102 (September 2018): 6–19.
Miles Brundage et al, “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.07228, February 2018.
Garrett M. Graff, “Experts Knew a Pandemic Was Coming. Here’s What They’re Worried About Next,” Politico, May 7, 2020.
XIV. Fictional Apocalypses (one session)
Brooks, World War Z, all.
XV. The End of the Class as We Know It: A Simulation
