David Brooks Sees Complacency Where He Should See Corruption

In his column "Drilling for Certainty," David Brooks writes a very traditionally Brooks column: He identifies a real and interesting problem, completely misses its important causes, and fails to provide any sort of solution.

I would be the first to agree with all his premises in the column: Human beings are indeed very bad at risk assessment, risk assessment does get more difficult as the world becomes more complicated, and poor risk assessment can lead to disasters on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. However, if the ever-increasing complexity of the world is a problem, we have to either find a solution or forsake technology.