CHAPTER 11 A Foolproofer’s Handbook: How to Make the Most of Our Best InstinctsRead more at location 3517
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In the face of this irony, what should we do? Can we truly foolproof our surroundings if we so often cause more mischief in doing so? Or should we be ecologists and allow natural systems to take their course? At the end of this journey, I concluded that the answer is neither: we must reconcile the engineers with the ecologists. But how?Read more at location 3555
In search of an answer, I traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, one March morning in 2014 to meet with Larry Summers.Read more at location 3559
By providing confidence, moral hazard enables society to do things and take risks that it otherwise wouldn’t, many of which make us better off.Read more at location 3573
safety is a state of mind, not a statute. You can write laws that tell people their bank can fail, their money market fund may not pay back a dollar per share, their home is not insured if a nearby levee fails, or their uncooked food might carry dangerous pathogens. Yet this won’t change their behavior if their experience tells them that banks never fail, money market funds always pay back a dollar, the levee always holds, and uncooked food never makes them sick.Read more at location 3586
expunging moral hazard would also expunge confidence and all the beneficial risk taking that confidence enables.Read more at location 3589
Of course, we cannot endure a crisis and recession that cost the United States from $6 trillion to $14 trillion and do nothing. The question is, what can we do that won’t make matters worse?Read more at location 3598
Summers is an engineer: he is a vocal advocate of using the macroeconomic levers of government to control inflation and raise employment,Read more at location 3600
“The jet makes things better, it connects things in better ways, but the crashes are more dramatic. If you never invented the jumbo jet, you could never have a crash that killed more than two hundred people.Read more at location 3608
Though it seems repugnant to put a price on human life, it happens all the time, when juries award damages for negligence resulting in death,Read more at location 3622
Federal agencies, for example, typically put the value of a statistical life at $9 million. Would you pay $9 million to save your own life (assuming you had $9 million)? Of course you would. Now let me ask the question slightly differently: would you pay $9 to reduce the chance of death by one in one million? Quite possibly not.Read more at location 3624
Bioethicists refer to the “rule of rescue,” the urge to help those we see are in distress, even when the help might better be devoted to serving a larger, less visible population. The rule of rescue can lead to very bad decisions.Read more at location 3630
There is another cost that foolproofers must consider when trying to make us safer: our loss of freedom.Read more at location 3636
We really can limit danger and risk if we are willing to use rules, prohibitions, and jail time. This is one way around the Peltzman effect. If we worry that making an activity safer encourages more risk, ban the activity altogether.Read more at location 3637
Opponents of seat-belt laws often base their arguments on freedom, not health. Despite overwhelming evidence that they reduce deaths and injuries, mandatory motorcycle helmet laws have been repealed in many states, often in response to litigation branding such laws an infringement on motorcyclists’ liberty and an unconstitutional exercise of police power.Read more at location 3643
As I explored our efforts to create safety, I discovered one remedy that seems to work everywhere: space.Read more at location 3677
For example, when I asked Adrian Lund of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety why aviation has had more success reducing accidents than automobiles have, his answer surprised me: “In aviation … it’s an easier problem to deal with.Read more at location 3678
My wife is a stickler for space. Early in her driving career, she learned that keeping space around your car is one of the easiest ways to avoid a collision.Read more at location 3694
Jadwin recommended the creation of a series of floodways — normally habitable land that would be allowed to flood to relieve pressure on the river.Read more at location 3714
By deliberately flooding less populated farmland, the Jadwin plan would protect the cities and more populated centers along the river.Read more at location 3717
The financial and economic worlds have their equivalent of space: it’s called capital. This is essentially the cushion of shareholder capital that is available to absorb losses.Read more at location 3733
Capital has, correctly, become the central tool in regulators’ drive to reinforce the financial system against another crisis.Read more at location 3741
That leads us to the final lesson of how to foolproof ourselves. As we have seen throughout this book, we often seek safety in response to fear, and fear is rooted in experience.Read more at location 3746
The experience of crisis or disaster makes survivors more conscientious and risk averse. Houses built immediately after a hurricane are less likely to suffer damage in the next one.Read more at location 3747
Moreover, experience is of limited help when disasters are rare. “One can be a particularly poor driver and never become involved in an auto accident,” note Donald MacGregor and Paul Slovic.Read more at location 3751
A country can change its attitude toward risk just as a company can. Canada drew praise in the wake of the global financial crisis for the fact that none of its banks failed or needed bailouts; indeed, they emerged stronger than they had been, an important reason Canada’s recession was much milder than that of the United States. This is often attributed to culture: the stereotype is that Canadians are more risk averse, less swashbuckling than Americans. There’s some truth to this.Read more at location 3790
Yet the different experiences during the crisis are not all due to culture. Canadians are as susceptible to bubbles, fraudsters, and charlatans as Americans. Two small Canadian banks collapsed during the 1980s, and a crippling real estate depression laid many banks low in the early 1990s. Importantly, this left an imprint on both bankers and regulators.Read more at location 3795
The Canadian government absorbed the lessons of the 1980s and 1990s as well. It created an independent regulator that steadily pushed banks to raise their capital sooner than its foreign competitors did.Read more at location 3816
The right tradeoff between risk and stability will maximize the units of innovation we get per unit of instability. It has taken us a century to learn that trying to put out every fire is a recipe for bigger, deadlier fires. The solution is not to let all fires burn, but to make it possible for small fires to burn without hurting people so that we save our resources for the big fires.Read more at location 3833
