In recent weeks there's been a low hum of pretty interesting and not-so-interesting essays asking why there has been so much attention paid in the zombie apocalypse, and what that attention signifies. 

I bring this up because the Discovery Channel will be airing it's Zombie Apocalypse documentary this evening.  The New York Times' Neal Genzlinger reviews it and finds it... pretty wanting: 

Thank goodness we’ll all be wiped out by the Maya doomsday by week’s end. That will spare us the discomfort of having to go through the impending zombie apocalypse....

The National Geographic Channel’s “Doomsday Preppers,” among others, has already introduced viewers to people who go to seemingly extreme lengths to get ready for terrorist attacks, the collapse of the financial system, nuclear power plant disasters and more, so perhaps it’s no surprise that, at least according to this program, there are some among us who are seriously preparing for a zombie attack. What makes this program different is that among clips of the preppers spewing nonsense about how to shoot a zombie, it intercuts interviews with credentialed academics who say that, yes, a virus or some such that attacks the brain could find its way into humans, disseminate rapidly and cause symptoms that would make us resemble all those zombies we know and love from the movies....

The program also gives you the rare experience of hearing a professor (Daniel W. Drezner of Tufts University) described as the “author of ‘Theories of International Politics and Zombies’ ” — on Monday, No. 40 on Amazon’s list of best sellers in its sub-sub-subcategory of international and world politics. And it provides a new entry for the list of you-must-be-joking organizations: apparently there actually is something called theKansas Anti Zombie Militia.

But it’s hard right now to take this program in the pop-culture way it was intended, especially the idiocy that comes out of the mouths of the various preppers. “Some people’s epiphany,” says one, Matthew Oakey, “is when they realize that the guy that lives on their block with all the guns and ammo isn’t crazy.”

I haven't seen the documentary yet, so I can't really comment on it except what I recall from their interview of me three months ago.  Three thoughts, though: 

1)  Given the reported claim that Nancy Lanza was in fact a doomsday prepper, I have to share Mr. Genzlinger's concern about the unfortunate timing of this broadcast.  Some television networks have made alterations to their broadcasts because of the Sandy Hook attack.  I'm not sure this program rises to that level, but the timing makes me wince, which is probably not a good sign. 

2) Damn, I need to update my Fletcher page. Seriously, that thing is at least three years out of date.

3)  Regarding my participation in the documentary, well, I'll just reprint what Newsday's  Verne Gay wrote: 

One of the "experts" quoted here is in fact a respected scholar in foreign policy at Tufts who has written widely on zombies, though largely as metaphors for chaos in world markets and how people adapt. In an email, I asked Dan Drezner about the program, and he responded that a book he had written on the subject was "intended to be funny [but] one of the points I make is that fears about zombie apocalypses are exaggerated because people underestimate the adaptability of humans." He added, "I have no idea if that got in or not."

Sorry, professor -- it did not get in, and the documentary is not funny.

That's unfortunate... and it gives rise to an almost sacrilegious question:  have we hit the law of diminishing marginal returns on the living dead?   On the popular culture front, when Twilight-like books and films are being made about zombies (though I gotta admit I like what I see from the trailer) and the sign of Nick's loserdom in The New Girl is that he's working on a lame zombie novel, I fear we've hit saturation point. 

On the utility-of-the-metaphor front, I will defend the use of fictional analogies as a way of stimulating creative thinking and calling attention  to useful policy measures until my last undying breath.  I wrote Theories of International Politics and Zombies because I thought it would make some people laugh and make some people think; it was a subversive way to get some book-learning into the cerebellum. Since the book has come out, however, I find that the questions I get from reporters and documentarians about the living dead have morphed from seriocomic to just dead serious. 

I share Alyssa Rosenberg's concern that people are focusing way too much on being in the apocalypse as opposed to how we get to the apocalypse and whether it can be stopped.  Analogies free up certain pattens of thought while also constraining others.  Because so many zombie narratives assume that no matter what humans do, we wind  up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there's a tendency to presume that this must and always be so.  That constraint is starting to become more prominent. 

So to sum up:  I'm in a zombie documentary this evening, it's apparently not that great, I'm quite confident that the zombie apocalypse won't happen, and my Fletcher page is badly in need of updating.  That is all.

I was all set this morning to blog more about high-falutin' theoretical IR debates or what's happening in Libya or whether Hugo Chavez can really move all of his gold without these guys somehow stealing it, when, well.... this happened: 

So instead, today your humble blogger was busy stockpiling supplies like vodka fresh water, whiskey, batteries, bourbon, dry goods, etc. 

This might seem like an overreaction, and hopefully, it will be.  However, I learned a valuable lesson from the last time I labeled an event like this as "hurricane porn."  Never again will I trivialize hurricane warnings.  Even if, nine times out of ten, a hurricane/tropical storm/tropical depression turns out to be less than advertised, there is that one time that the worst case scenario nis actually realized.  And in that event, better to be prepared than not. 

Of course, the problem with this approach is that after each iteration in which a natural disaster warning does not come to fruition, one is  tempted to be more blasé about the next one.  It's the meteorilogical equivalent of festering foreign policy problems -- unless and until a slow-motion problem becomes an acute crisis, attention will not be paid. 

Still, on a day when parts of New York are being evacuated, I am grateful that this is unlikely to happen: 

Your humble blogger is taking a short vacation, because so much friggin' stuff has happened in the past half-year.  Indeed, in 2011 to date, the planet has lived up to FP's motto:  the world is not a boring place.  Wars, revolutions, natural disasters, non-natural disasters, the possibility of sovereign defaults -- for a world politics junkie, it's been very exciting

Does exciting mean the coming of end-times, however?  I ask because the New York Times' Azam Ahmed observes the latest trendy investment --  Armageddon funds:

Since the financial crisis, many investors have prospered from a rebound in the markets. But recent events have led some to brace for the worst.

“Clients are suddenly realizing the world isn’t as rosy as it’s been,” said Ahmed Fattouh, a hedge fund executive. “It makes a lot of sense to have these tail protections on.”

That is, protections against what Wall Street calls “tail risk” — a disaster that is estimated to have less than half a percent chance of happening....

So how do such Armageddon funds work? Take a situation like the collapse of China’s economy, an event considered highly unlikely. While most American investors do not own Chinese stocks, real estate or currency, the fear is that a shock to China would spread to the rest of the world. As the stock markets fell, a tail risk or black swan fund would profit because it owned the options to sell shares in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index at far higher levels. The more the index dropped, the more valuable those options would become.

On a related note, Jay Ulfelder looks at the release of the 2011 Failed States Index and Admiral Mike Mullen's worries about a possible increase in the number of failed states.  Ulfelder is more sanguine than Mullen:

So, is the world falling apart, or is it settling down? I’m cautiously confident that the optimists have this one right. To my mind, the trends Alan Taylor identifies are the start of the big development story of the 21st century. After a century in which the global political economy was primarily characterized by the yawning gap in wealth and power between the so-called First and Third Worlds, that gap is finally narrowing. Economic growth is accelerating in countries long mired in a “poverty trap,” and the economic and political benefits of that trend are extending to more and more of the world’s human population. Hundreds of millions of people still live in abject poverty, under authoritarian rule, or both, but the share of the global population living in deep poverty is notably lower than it was just a couple of decades ago (see the chart below, from the World Bank), and the economic takeoffs occurring in many long-poor countries suggest that trend is only broadening....

If things are generally looking up, why are people like Adm. Mullen (if I haven’t misunderstood his remarks) still so worried about the coming anarchy? In a bit of armchair psychology, I wonder if the admiral’s gloomy prognosis is partly a result of confusing uncertainty with risk. The encouraging development trends mentioned above are reordering politics at the international and national levels to a degree not seen in several generations, and no one knows when this turbulent period will end and what its results will be. People are inherently uncomfortable with uncertainty, and it seems like that discomfort often inflates our sense of the risk that worst-case scenarios will come to pass. In other words, our fear of dire outcomes seems to cause us to overestimate the probability that they will occur. In this particular case, I sure hope that’s right.

As pessimistic as I am about the ability of great powers to handle end times, I have to side with Ulfelder here.  Nicholas Taleb made a lot of coin by pointing out the ways in which tail risk events happened far more frequently than expected, but I do wonder if expectations of these events are now biased in the opposite direction.  There is a lot of uncertainty in the world -- but uncertainty and catastrophic outcomes are not the same thing. 

That said, there is another possibility to consider.  From 1945 onewards, one could argue that the chief sources of uncertainty were located in the developing world.  The developing world is becoming more developed, and the developed world is becoming more politically sclerotic.  It's possible that, moving forward, the OECD economies become the primary source of uncertainty -- but this uncertainty doesn't faze developing markets all that much. 

What do you think?