As with any catastrophe, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak has lead to a flurry of questions about what went wrong, and how it was allowed to happen — by the companies involved, the government, the public, or whoever. It’s sparked some interesting commentary on the nature of risk, linking the spill with other recent crises — and possible future ones. Why didn’t we/they take note of the risk, and take steps to avoid it?

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein had this to say:

The last few years have been an ongoing seminar on the reality of serious risk. Very bad things that look likely to happen eventually do happen. The financial crisis, the Massey coal-mine disaster, the Greek debt crisis, the BP oil spill.

It’s a good reason, he says, to pay attention to climate change warning: we’ve had plenty of warning now to listen to the experts when they warn of a serious risk.

David Leonhart in the New York Times Magazine similarly draws a link between the inability to reasonably predict both the risk of the rig explosion, and of that classic ‘black swan’ event, the subprime crisis:

Most of the people running Deepwater Horizon probably never had a rig explode on them. So they assumed it would not happen, at least not to them. Similarly, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan liked to argue, not so long ago, that the national real estate market was not in a bubble because it had never been in one before.

The accelerating speed of innovation seems to be outstripping government regulators’ capacity to deal with risks, much less anticipate them.

We wonder, though, quite how direct a comparison can be drawn between say the events that led to the 2008 financial collapse and the risk of the more physical disaster of the failure.