Politicians congenitally incapable of difficult choices (August 2 2012) Politicians congenitally incapable of difficult choices (August 2 2012)

Kenneth Saul Rogoff the 59 year old American Professor of Public Policy & Economics, and a chess Grandmaster has published an article on the Project Syndicate titled ‘Will Governmental Folly Now Allow for a Cyber Crisis?’ claiming most politicians are congenitally incapable of making difficult choices until risks actually materialise. In the article Rogoff states “When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, many shocked critics asked why markets, regulators and financial experts failed to see it coming. Today, one might ask the same question about the global economy’s vulnerability to cyber-attack. Indeed, the parallels between financial crises and the threat of cyber meltdowns are striking. Although the greatest cyber threat comes from rogue states with the capacity to develop extremely sophisticated computer viruses, risks can also come from anarchistic hackers and terrorists, or even from computer glitches compounded by natural catastrophe. …No economy is more vulnerable than the US, and it is arrogance to believe that US cyber superiority (to all except perhaps China) provides it with impenetrable security from attack. …Unfortunately the solution is not so simple as just building better anti-virus programmes. Virus protection and virus development constitute an uneven arms race. A virus can be just a couple hundred lines of computer code, compared to hundreds of thousands of lines for anti-virus programmes, which must be designed to detect wide classes of enemies. We are told not to worry about large-scale cyber meltdowns, because none has occurred, and governments are being vigilant.”

 

Inspired by Project Syndicate ow.ly/czr9N image source IMF ow.ly/czr1P