MegaThreats

Before Thanksgiving, I reviewed Nouriel Roubini's new book MegaThreats for The Wall Street Journal. I've included the first two paragraphs of the review and a link to the full piece below.  

A Journey to Mount Doom
Many challenges modern society faces are slow-moving. Those who warn about them often end up looking like the boy who cried wolf.

Since Gilgamesh, apocalyptic prophecies have been a staple of human culture. These stories follow a familiar pattern: God will punish man for his sins by ending the world. But as faith has waned, the genre has taken a scientific turn, from Elizabeth Kolbert predicting mass extinction as a result of our burning fossil fuel to Nick Bostrom theorizing that our work in artificial intelligence could lead to being ruled by robots. Nouriel Roubini, with his book “MegaThreats,” makes those Cassandras look like Pollyannas.

“Will a deadly pandemic finish us before the transition to machines is complete?” asks Mr. Roubini, an economist and consultant who earned the sobriquet “Dr. Doom” for his congenital pessimism. “Will climate change destroy the planet before rational machines come to the rescue? Will we suffocate under a mountain of debt? Or will the U.S. and China destroy the world in a military conflict as competition to control the industries of the future becomes extreme?” In fields from economics to epidemiology to foreign policy to technology, the author finds reasons for fear and even panic.