# That Turn To Pascagoula

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 10 Jul 2020, 24 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/30a8739d-99c9-45b7-bc9f-ae39003e5a9f/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

For years, people had warned that New Orleans was vulnerable - but when a hurricane came close to destroying the city, the reaction was muted. Some people took the near miss as a warning - others, as confirmation that there was nothing to worry about. So why do we struggle to prepare for disasters? And why don't we draw the obvious lessons from clear warnings? Sources for this episode include Amanda Ripley's The Unthinkable, The Ostrich Paradox by Howard Kunreuther and Robert Meyer, Margaret Heffernan's Willful Blindness, and Predictable Surprises by Max Bazerman and Michael Watkins. For a full list of sources see http://timharford.com/ Tim's latest books 'Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy' and 'The Next Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy' are available now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin. We could have seen it coming. We really could.
[0:33] Speaker 1: For years, people had warned that New Orleans was vulnerable.
[0:37] Speaker 1: The Houston Chronicle reported that if a major hurricane struck,
[0:41] Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty thousand people would be stranded in
[0:44] Speaker 1: the low lying city, their homes underwater. A local emergency
[0:49] Speaker 1: management director told the newspaper, I don't even want to
[0:53] Speaker 1: think about the loss of life a huge hurricane would cause.
[0:56] Speaker 1: That's understandable, it's also part of the problem. The Houston
[1:02] Speaker 1: Chronicle wasn't the only newspaper to examine the risks. The
[1:05] Speaker 1: New Orleans Times Picayune published a five heart series, opening
[1:10] Speaker 1: with It's only a matter of time before South Louisiana
[1:14] Speaker 1: takes a direct hit from a major hurricane. They added
[1:18] Speaker 1: that the levees, the last line of defense, might not
[1:21] Speaker 1: be strong enough. Much of New Orleans lies below sea level,
[1:26] Speaker 1: some of the levees were in poor repair. The risk
[1:29] Speaker 1: of a levee failure was obvious. National Geographic vividly described
[1:34] Speaker 1: a scenario in which fifty thousand people drowned. The Red
[1:38] Speaker 1: Cross feared a similar death toll. Even FEMA, the Federal
[1:42] Speaker 1: Emergency Management Agency, was alert. In two thousand and one,
[1:47] Speaker 1: It had stated that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans
[1:51] Speaker 1: was one of the three likeliest catastrophes facing the United States.
[1:56] Speaker 1: So yes, we could have seen it coming, and now
[2:00] Speaker 1: the disaster scenario was becoming a reality. A four hundred
[2:05] Speaker 1: mile an hour hurricane was heading directly towards the city.
[2:09] Speaker 1: More than a million residents were warned to evacuate. USA
[2:12] Speaker 1: Today warned of a modern Atlantis. The newspaper explained that
[2:17] Speaker 1: the hurricane could overwhelm New Orleans with up to twenty
[2:21] Speaker 1: feet of filthy, chemical polluted water. The city's mayor, Ray Nagin,
[2:27] Speaker 1: begged people to get away. He was reluctant to make
[2:30] Speaker 1: evacuation mandatree because around a hundred thousand people had no
[2:35] Speaker 1: cars and no way of leaving. The roads out were
[2:39] Speaker 1: jammed anyway. It took ten or twelve hours just to
[2:41] Speaker 1: get out of Baton Rouge, only eighty miles away. Thousands
[2:46] Speaker 1: of visiting conference delegates were stranded. The airport had been closed.
[2:51] Speaker 1: There weren't enough emergency shelters. Nagin suggested using a local stadium,
[2:56] Speaker 1: the Louisiana Superdome, as a temporary refuge, but the Superdome
[3:00] Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily hurricane proof, and Nagan was warned that it
[3:05] Speaker 1: wasn't equipped to be a shelter. But then the storm
[3:11] Speaker 1: turned aside. The hurricane's name was not Katrina, it was
[3:17] Speaker 1: Hurricane Ivan. It was September two thousand and four, and
[3:22] Speaker 1: ne Orleans had been spared, and Hurricane Ivan had provided
[3:27] Speaker 1: the city and the nation with a vivid warning. I'm
[3:32] Speaker 1: Tim Harvard, and you were listening to cautionary tales. In
[3:59] Speaker 1: two thousand and three, the Harvard Business Review published an
[4:02] Speaker 1: article titled Predictable Surprises The Disasters You should have seen coming.
[4:08] Speaker 1: The author, Max Beseman and Michael Watkins are both business
[4:12] Speaker 1: school professors, and they followed up with a book, also
[4:15] Speaker 1: called Predictable Surprises. Baseman and Watkins argued that while the
[4:20] Speaker 1: world is an unpredictable place, unpredictability is often not the problem.
[4:26] Speaker 1: The problem is that even when we're faced with clear risks,
[4:30] Speaker 1: we still fail to act. Hurricane Katrina looming over New
[4:36] Speaker 1: Orleans was one of those clear risks. The near miss
[4:40] Speaker 1: of Hurricane Ivan had demonstrated the need to prepare urgently
[4:45] Speaker 1: and honor a dozen different fronts for the next hurricane,
[4:49] Speaker 1: but the authorities did not act swiftly or decisively enough.
[4:54] Speaker 1: Eleven months after Ivan Katrina drowned the city and hundreds
[5:00] Speaker 1: of its residents, has predicted, many tens of thousands of
[5:05] Speaker 1: citizens had been unable or unwilling to evacuate as predicted.
[5:10] Speaker 1: Levies had been breached in many places as predicted, the
[5:14] Speaker 1: Superdome had been an inadequate shelter. Surely, with such a
[5:19] Speaker 1: clear warning, New Orleans should have been better prepared to
[5:23] Speaker 1: withstand Hurricane Katrina. It's easily said, but look at how
[5:31] Speaker 1: the new coronavirus swept the globe, killing thousands every day
[5:35] Speaker 1: and driving us into economically devastating lockdowns. New Orleans isn't
[5:40] Speaker 1: the only place that didn't prepare for a predictable catastrophe.
[5:45] Speaker 1: It's not like pandemics or a new issue, after all.
[5:49] Speaker 1: Michael Watkins, author of Predictable Surprises, sent me over the
[5:53] Speaker 1: notes for a pandemic response exercise that he ran at
[5:56] Speaker 1: Harvard University. I've got it right here. The exercise begins
[6:01] Speaker 1: with this scenario. One week after four classes begin, five
[6:05] Speaker 1: students who just returned from a trip to Southern Africa
[6:08] Speaker 1: become very ill. One subsequently dies, throwing the student body
[6:12] Speaker 1: into turmoil. After a lull, significant numbers of new cases emerge,
[6:17] Speaker 1: signaling the beginning of an outbreak in the university and
[6:20] Speaker 1: the broader community. It's supposed to be a role playing
[6:24] Speaker 1: exercise for business school students, and in the exercise things
[6:28] Speaker 1: soon get worse. Rumors spread, people socially distance classes move
[6:33] Speaker 1: online that the date on the document is the twelfth
[6:37] Speaker 1: of October two thousand and two. We've been thinking about
[6:42] Speaker 1: pandemics for a long time, not just in business school
[6:46] Speaker 1: exercises either. What about Bill Gates's twenty fifteen TED talk
[6:50] Speaker 1: titled the Next Outbreak? We're not ready. If anything kills
[6:56] Speaker 1: over ten million people in the next few decades, it's
[7:00] Speaker 1: most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than
[7:04] Speaker 1: a war. Not missiles but microbs. Bill Gates, He's not
[7:10] Speaker 1: exactly a marginal figure, is he. I have friends at TED.
[7:14] Speaker 1: I called them to ask how many people watched the
[7:17] Speaker 1: talk before this year began, before it suddenly became so newsworthy.
[7:22] Speaker 1: They told me two and a half a million people.
[7:25] Speaker 1: That is a lot of people who at least saw them.
[7:28] Speaker 1: EMMO officialdom had also been sounding the alarm. The World
[7:33] Speaker 1: Health Organization and the World Bank had convened the Global
[7:37] Speaker 1: Preparedness Monitoring Board. In October last year, they published a
[7:42] Speaker 1: report calling for better preparation for managing the fallout of
[7:47] Speaker 1: a high impact respiratory pathogen. A high impact respiratory pathogen
[7:52] Speaker 1: was a risk who knew while the Global Preparedness Monitoring
[7:56] Speaker 1: Board knew, it seems and alongside these authoritative warnings were
[8:01] Speaker 1: the near misses the pandemic versions of Hurricane Ivan in
[8:05] Speaker 1: the last twenty years CSARS H five N one H
[8:10] Speaker 1: one N one ebola mers. Each deadly outbreak sparked brief
[8:16] Speaker 1: and justifiable alarm, followed by a collective shrug of the shoulders.
[8:22] Speaker 1: We were warned, both by the experts and by reality,
[8:26] Speaker 1: Yet on most fronts, who were still caught unprepared. Why
[8:36] Speaker 1: let's meet mere Patrick Turner a citizen of New Orleans,
[8:41] Speaker 1: a veteran of the Second World War. When Hurricane Ivan
[8:45] Speaker 1: bore down on the city, Turner was eighty four years old.
[8:49] Speaker 1: His family heeded the mayor's warning. They prepared to evacuate
[8:53] Speaker 1: to Austin, Texas that's five hundred miles. Turner was reluctant
[8:59] Speaker 1: to go. He had seen a lot of hurricanes just
[9:02] Speaker 1: miss New Orleans. The storms always make that turn to Pascagoula,
[9:07] Speaker 1: he would say, referring to the city a hundred miles
[9:10] Speaker 1: down the coast. But Turner's family insisted he evacuate, so
[9:15] Speaker 1: he squeezed himself into the crowded car. Remember how bad
[9:20] Speaker 1: the traffic was, how people were driving from dawn till
[9:24] Speaker 1: dusk just to cover the first eighty miles out of
[9:27] Speaker 1: New Orleans. It was a nightmarish journey for an old man,
[9:31] Speaker 1: and Hurricane Ivan made the turn to Pascagoula, just like
[9:36] Speaker 1: storms always did, well, almost always. Turner had experienced to
[9:43] Speaker 1: hurricane breaching the levees in New Orleans once before, but
[9:46] Speaker 1: that was nearly four decades earlier, and when Turner's family
[9:50] Speaker 1: told the story, what they remembered most was a stray cat.
[9:54] Speaker 1: The frightened feline had ducked under the skirting around the
[9:57] Speaker 1: outside of the Turner's house and was now penned under
[10:00] Speaker 1: their floorboards. By the high waters. They could hear it
[10:03] Speaker 1: plaintively mewing. Patrick Turner wasn't about to spend the next
[10:07] Speaker 1: week listening to the cat whimper for help as it starved.
[10:11] Speaker 1: His daughter, Sheila, told the tale to the writer Amanda
[10:14] Speaker 1: Ripley of how all of them crawled around on the
[10:17] Speaker 1: floor trying to figure out where the cat was. They
[10:20] Speaker 1: figured it was, of all places, under the washing machine.
[10:24] Speaker 1: So Sheila's dad moved the machine and sowed a cartoon
[10:28] Speaker 1: like circle in the wooden floor to see the cat
[10:31] Speaker 1: spring up to safety. That was mister Turner practical. Now
[10:42] Speaker 1: it was two thousand and five, Hurricane Katrina was heading
[10:46] Speaker 1: remorselessly towards the city. A local weatherman's cheerful demeanor cracked,
[10:52] Speaker 1: and he told his viewers, may God be with you.
[10:55] Speaker 1: Patrick Turner's family once again begged the old man to
[10:59] Speaker 1: evacuate with them, but this time he was in no
[11:01] Speaker 1: mood to listen. He was eighty five years old, a widower,
[11:06] Speaker 1: living alone, and anyway, the storms always make that turn
[11:09] Speaker 1: to Pascagoula, And so mister Turner told his children, I'm
[11:14] Speaker 1: not going. His daughter, Sheila, reminded him about the Hurricane
[11:18] Speaker 1: lad Weather forty years ago. Yes, yes, Dad, forget the cat.
[11:23] Speaker 1: Think about the tens of thousands of homes that flooded.
[11:26] Speaker 1: Think about the dozens of people who were killed. Remember
[11:30] Speaker 1: those poor souls who were trapped in their own attics
[11:33] Speaker 1: by the rising water. Stories still circulating New Orleans of
[11:37] Speaker 1: the claw marks they left as they tried to get out. No,
[11:42] Speaker 1: said old mister Turner. I listened to you last year,
[11:45] Speaker 1: and I was stuck in your damned calf for hours
[11:48] Speaker 1: on end. I'm staying. Sheila kept trying, so did his
[11:54] Speaker 1: other children. He got so tired of the calls that
[11:56] Speaker 1: he took the phone off the hook. Many others felt similarly,
[12:02] Speaker 1: not most by any means, eighty percent of the population
[12:05] Speaker 1: of New Orleans decided to evacuate. It's commonly assumed that
[12:09] Speaker 1: the people who stayed simply couldn't get out, but when
[12:12] Speaker 1: night Ridder newspapers investigated after the storm, they found that
[12:16] Speaker 1: those who died weren't disproportionately poor or black. Some people
[12:21] Speaker 1: were just stuck, of course, But many others weighed up
[12:24] Speaker 1: the risks, thought about the agonies of evacuating, remembered Hurricane Ivan,
[12:30] Speaker 1: and decided that things would be okay if they toughed
[12:33] Speaker 1: it out. For many people, Hurricane Ivan wasn't viewed as
[12:36] Speaker 1: a warning of how bad things could get. It was
[12:40] Speaker 1: viewed as yet another false alarm. Of course, it wasn't.
[12:46] Speaker 1: Patrick Turner was trapped by the rising water, just like
[12:50] Speaker 1: the cat he had rescued forty years before, But there
[12:54] Speaker 1: was nobody to rescue him, and the New Orleans Fire
[12:57] Speaker 1: Department only managed to reach him two weeks later. He
[13:02] Speaker 1: was dead, apparently of a heart attack. The devoted family
[13:08] Speaker 1: man had died made alone in his attic because this
[13:11] Speaker 1: storm didn't make that turn to Pascagoula. The appearance of
[13:30] Speaker 1: SARS in late two thousand and two should have been
[13:34] Speaker 1: a warning to us all SARS is deadly, considerably more
[13:38] Speaker 1: dangerous than COVID nineteen, but fortunately it proved easier to contain.
[13:44] Speaker 1: Several thousand people caught it, several hundred people died, and
[13:48] Speaker 1: the economies of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan took
[13:53] Speaker 1: a pounding. For them, SARS wasn't a near miss. It
[13:58] Speaker 1: was a painful hit, and many of those countries took note,
[14:02] Speaker 1: investing in public health infrastructure and preparing for the next pandemic.
[14:07] Speaker 1: For most of the rest of US, however, SARS was
[14:10] Speaker 1: more like Hurricane Ivan, all out fuss, and in the
[14:14] Speaker 1: end it was fine. Instead of concluding that was a
[14:18] Speaker 1: close thing, we'd better prepare, we concluded the doommongers are
[14:23] Speaker 1: always giving us disaster scenarios and it's never as bad
[14:27] Speaker 1: as they say, the same with myrrs. The same in
[14:31] Speaker 1: two thousand and nine with H one N one, sometimes
[14:35] Speaker 1: called swine flu. Swine flu was the first time the
[14:38] Speaker 1: WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern. People
[14:44] Speaker 1: were really worried about swine flu, but in retrospect it
[14:48] Speaker 1: seems to have been quite similar to the seasonal flu
[14:51] Speaker 1: that hits us every year, which kills a few hundred
[14:55] Speaker 1: thousand people around the globe, but doesn't change our way
[14:58] Speaker 1: of life. Rosalind Baschelo could tell you all about H
[15:03] Speaker 1: one N one. She was the French health minister at
[15:06] Speaker 1: the time of the outbreak, and she took it seriously.
[15:10] Speaker 1: She stopped up on masks, She ordered ninety four million
[15:13] Speaker 1: doses of flu vaccine. She did everything we now complain
[15:19] Speaker 1: our leaders didn't do, and in the end swine flu
[15:24] Speaker 1: took that turn to Pascagoula. It didn't kill tens of
[15:28] Speaker 1: millions of people. Did the French public and media congratulate
[15:32] Speaker 1: Rosalind Bachelo for her sensible precaution. They did not. They
[15:36] Speaker 1: looked at how much public money she had spent on
[15:39] Speaker 1: masks and vaccines some four hundred million euros about half
[15:43] Speaker 1: a billion dollars, and they blamed her for it. Two
[15:47] Speaker 1: years later, a new governor of California took office after
[15:50] Speaker 1: a brutal recession. Jerry Brown started to look for ways
[15:54] Speaker 1: to save public money, and he alighted on an expensive
[15:58] Speaker 1: stockpile of medical supplies maintained by his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
[16:04] Speaker 1: Arnie had spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating mobile
[16:08] Speaker 1: hospitals that emergency responders could use to deal with earthquakes, fires,
[16:12] Speaker 1: and yes, pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, the
[16:18] Speaker 1: stockpile included fifty million n ninety five respirators, two thousand,
[16:22] Speaker 1: four hundred portable ventilators, and kits to set up twenty
[16:25] Speaker 1: one thousand additional patient beds wherever they were needed. It's impressive,
[16:31] Speaker 1: but that stockpile is now nowhere to be found. When
[16:35] Speaker 1: Jerry Brown cut funding for the scheme, did voters howl
[16:38] Speaker 1: with protest? Did they make clear they wanted their scarce
[16:41] Speaker 1: tax dollars devoted to sensible preparedness? They did not. Politicians
[16:47] Speaker 1: have other priorities. Because we have other priorities. We voters
[16:53] Speaker 1: don't take kindly to those who spend our taxes preparing
[16:56] Speaker 1: for disasters that may never happen, and the near misses.
[17:01] Speaker 1: All too often, the near misses only make things worse.
[17:09] Speaker 1: Less than four years ago, my own country, the UK
[17:13] Speaker 1: ran a pandemic planning scenario dubbed Exercise Sickness. It sounds
[17:19] Speaker 1: like an awesome piece of forethought, but it doesn't seem
[17:22] Speaker 1: to have helped the country to prepare for COVID nineteen.
[17:25] Speaker 1: It might even have made it harder. Why The problem
[17:30] Speaker 1: was that Exercise sickness was about preparing for a dangerous
[17:33] Speaker 1: flu outbreak, but coronavirus is not the flu. The government
[17:39] Speaker 1: had learned some very specific lessons that they had to
[17:42] Speaker 1: painfully unlearn as the unusual features of COVID nineteen became apparent.
[17:48] Speaker 1: That's a problem with many predictable surprises. They're only predictable
[17:52] Speaker 1: in a general sort of way. The details aren't predictable
[17:56] Speaker 1: at all. Hurricanes in New Orleans should be among the
[18:01] Speaker 1: easiest disasters to prepare for. It's pretty clear what will
[18:04] Speaker 1: help strengthening levies, installing pumps, and it's a scot handle
[18:09] Speaker 1: that those things weren't done before Katrina hit. But in
[18:13] Speaker 1: other cases, even though the general shape of the risk
[18:16] Speaker 1: is clear, false alarms are going off all the time
[18:19] Speaker 1: and the exact problem cannot be predicted. Well, how then
[18:23] Speaker 1: are we to prepare? We need to think bigger. It's
[18:28] Speaker 1: impossible to prepare for every eventuality, But the next best
[18:32] Speaker 1: thing is a massive all purpose resilience that comes from
[18:36] Speaker 1: having plenty of spare capacity in everything. The British government
[18:41] Speaker 1: should have learned from Exercise sickness that it would have
[18:43] Speaker 1: been a good idea to have a stockpile of things
[18:46] Speaker 1: that would probably be useful in any kind of pandemic,
[18:49] Speaker 1: such as gowns, visors or swabs. They didn't. That's hard
[18:55] Speaker 1: to forgive, but it's depressingly easy to understand. It's the
[19:00] Speaker 1: same reasoning that led Jerry Brown to dismantle Arnold Schwarzenegger's
[19:04] Speaker 1: sensible stockpile. All purpose resilience tends to look wasteful right
[19:10] Speaker 1: up until the point at which you desperately needed. Early
[19:18] Speaker 1: in the COVID nineteen pandemic, I spoke with a friend
[19:21] Speaker 1: of mine, a senior physician at the time. He was
[19:24] Speaker 1: recovering from the disease himself he had contracted it. While
[19:27] Speaker 1: tending to his patients, he reminisced about a day in
[19:31] Speaker 1: early March when the writing should have been on the wall.
[19:35] Speaker 1: Italians had started to die in alarming numbers, and his
[19:40] Speaker 1: hospital made an announcement they would no longer be providing
[19:44] Speaker 1: coffee for staff meetings. If the coffee budget had been
[19:47] Speaker 1: diverted to stockpiling masks and gowns, that would be impressive.
[19:52] Speaker 1: But who were we kidding. They were simply trying to
[19:55] Speaker 1: save money whenever they could. Organizations that won't pay for
[20:00] Speaker 1: coffee won't pay for resilience either. After Hurricane Katrina, the
[20:07] Speaker 1: city of New Orleans installed new pumps. They were supposed
[20:12] Speaker 1: to be strong enough to protect the city for fifty years, but,
[20:15] Speaker 1: as Margaret Heffernan describes in her book Willful Blindness, the
[20:20] Speaker 1: pumps weren't fit for the job. One whistleblower, the US
[20:24] Speaker 1: Army Corps engineer Maria Guazzino, told Heffernan the pumping systems
[20:29] Speaker 1: fell apart. Each time we'd turned them on, they'd blow
[20:31] Speaker 1: their guts out. Eventually, the final tests were just canceled. Instead,
[20:37] Speaker 1: the policy had become hope for the best. Gazino complained
[20:41] Speaker 1: and complained, and was repeatedly brushed off. Finally, an independent
[20:46] Speaker 1: report concluded she'd been right. The job had been botched,
[20:51] Speaker 1: costing hundreds of millions of dollars. In the summer of
[20:56] Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, New Orleans was under water again. The pumps
[21:00] Speaker 1: were failing, undersupplied with power, and unable to cope with
[21:05] Speaker 1: several weeks of persistent rain. It does not inspire confidence
[21:09] Speaker 1: for what will happen if another Katrina strikes, but there
[21:13] Speaker 1: is one more warning that New Orleans offers the rest
[21:16] Speaker 1: of us. Robert Mayer, the co author of the Ostrich Paradox,
[21:21] Speaker 1: says preparing for another Hurricane Katrina might not be enough.
[21:26] Speaker 1: Katrina wasn't even close to being the worst case scenario
[21:30] Speaker 1: for New Orleans. He told me. That would be a
[21:33] Speaker 1: full Category five storm hitting just east of the city.
[21:39] Speaker 1: The same may be true of the pandemic. Because COVID
[21:42] Speaker 1: nineteen has spread much faster than HIV and is more
[21:46] Speaker 1: dangerous than the flu, it's easy to imagine that this
[21:49] Speaker 1: is as bad as it could possibly get. It isn't.
[21:54] Speaker 1: Perhaps this pandemic is a challenge that should be teaching
[21:57] Speaker 1: us to think about other dangers from bio terrorism to
[22:01] Speaker 1: climate change. Or perhaps the next threat really is a
[22:05] Speaker 1: perfectly predictable surprise, another virus just like this one, but worse.
[22:12] Speaker 1: Imagine an illness as contagious as measles and as virulent
[22:16] Speaker 1: as ebola. Imagine a disease that disproportionately kills children rather
[22:21] Speaker 1: than the elderly. What if we're thinking about this the
[22:24] Speaker 1: wrong way? What if instead of seeing CSARS as the
[22:28] Speaker 1: warning for COVID nineteen, we should see COVID nineteen itself
[22:33] Speaker 1: as the warning next time? Will we be better prepared
[22:52] Speaker 1: to tell this story? We drew on the Unthinkable by
[22:55] Speaker 1: Amanda Ripley, The Ostrich Paradox by Howard Conroyther and Robert Meyer,
[23:00] Speaker 1: and Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan. As always, a full
[23:06] Speaker 1: list of our stories is available in the shows on
[23:09] Speaker 1: Tim Harford dot com. This cautionary tale was written and
[23:21] Speaker 1: presented by me Tim Harford, with help from Andrew Wright.
[23:25] Speaker 1: The show was produced by Ryan Dilley with support from
[23:28] Speaker 1: Marilyn Rust. The music mixing and sound design other work
[23:32] Speaker 1: of Pascal Wise. The scripts were edited by Julia Bartum.
[23:37] Speaker 1: Special thanks to Mia LaBelle Carlie Miliori Heather Fane, Maya Kanig,
[23:42] Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Bradwell. Cautionary Tales is a pushkin
[23:49] Speaker 1: industry's production

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