Safety crusaders --- Public interest organizations devoted to public safety

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Safety crusaders — Public interest organizations devoted to public safety

Life is filled with decisions, decisions involving different options, each option with pros and cons, pluses and minuses, etc. Often these options have associated with them likelihoods of different kinds of danger of different severities. Because each decision involves personal judgment it is necessarily subjective. All of the time we make decisions which reflect our own personal judgment as to the best option. Every day in making our way through life we make our decisions and the decisions we make decide much of the content and quality of our life.

Not only do individuals make decisions but governments also make decisions. They make decisions on building dams and levees. They make decisions on different kinds of government social programs. With each decision there are invariably pros and cons and the final decision is one of subjective judgment. If it is conservatives making the decision the result is likely to be quite different from what it would be if liberals make it. Underlying beliefs, outlooks, values and assumptions determine the kind of decisions made. The quality of the decisions made determine much about the nature and quality of life of the society.

Man has always lived in a world of risks and dangers. There are the possibilities of various sicknesses, health problems, diseases, hurricanes, floods, house fires, forest fires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. that might impact him and he has devised ways to reduce the amount of financial harm they might do to him by buying different kind of insurance — health insurance, homeowner’s insurance, flood insurance, automobile insurance, etc. He assesses the risk, considers what he can afford, and decides how much insurance he wants to buy.

Modern liberals tend to be hostile to capitalism and of the belief that capitalists are greedy, rapacious, bad people out to take advantage of the public. They believe the public needs to be protected from the capitalists. From their midst come the safety crusaders.

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Applied Economics. pp. 139 - 145

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Safety Movements

A very different kind of institution for dealing with risk has arisen in more recent times. This is the private organization or movement devoted to imposing safety requirements through publicity, litigation or regulation. These include "public interest" law firms, ideological organizations and movements, such as the so-called Center for Science in the Public Interest, and government agencies such as the National Highway Safety Administration. Since these organizations do not charge directly for their services like mutual aid societies or insurance companies, they must collect the money needed to support themselves from lawsuits, donations, or taxes. Put differently, their only money-making product or service is fear—and their incentives are to induce as much fear as possible in jurors, legislators, and the general public.

Whereas individuals weighing risks for themselves are restrained in how much risk reduction they will seek by the costs, there are no such restraints on the amount of risk reduction sought by those whose risk reduction is paid for with other people's money. Nor is here any such inherent restraint on how much fear they will generate from a given risk or how much credit they will claim for whatever risk reduction may take place, regardless of what the facts nay be.

Automobile safety is a classic example of third party safety decisions by organizations and movements whose money and power come from producing fear. Third-party safety crusades operate in some ways the opposite from risk-reduction processes in which those who are at risk choose alternatives for themselves and pay the costs themselves. The central question of how much risk is to be reduced at what costs is usually not raised at all by third-party safety organizations or movements. Nor are alternative risks weighed against one another. Instead, the theme is that something is "unsafe" and therefore needs to be made safe. The argument is essentially that existing risks show that current safeguards are inadequate and/or the people in control of them are insufficiently conscientious, or both. Therefore power and money need to be vested in new people and new institutions, in order to protect the public—according to this argument.

This kind of argument can be applied to almost anything, since nothing is literally 100 percent safe. It has been used against medications, pesticides, nuclear power, automobiles, and many other targets. Where the issue is the safety of nuclear power plants, for example, the answer to the question whether nuclear power is safe is obviously No! If nuclear power were safe, it would be the only safe thing on the face of the earth. This page that you are reading isn't safe. It can catch fire, which can spread and burn down your home, with you in it. The only meaningful question, to those who are spending their own money to deal with their own risks, is whether it is worth what it would cost to fireproof every page in every book, magazine, or newspaper.

In the case of nuclear power, the question of safety, in addition to cost, is Compared to what? Compared to generating electricity with hydroelectric dams or the burning of fossil fuels or compared to reducing our use of electricity with dimmer lights or foregoing the use of many things that are run by electricity and taking our chances on alternative power sources? Once the discussion changes to a discussion of incremental trade-offs, then nuclear power becomes one of the safest options. But neither it nor anything else is categorically safe.

These kinds of questions, which are central to safety decisions made by those who pay the costs, are conspicuous by their absence in third-party safety crusades. The rise of third-party safety advocates in the latter part of the twentieth century has brought with it categorical rhetoric in place of incremental analysis, and incentives to maximize fears rather than to minimize net injuries and deaths. A landmark in these trends was the 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader, attacking the safety of American automobiles in general and a car called the Corvair in particular. This book was not only historically important, as the beginning of a major political trend, but was also important in setting a pattern in methods of persuasion that have been followed by many other publications, politicians, and organizations in dealing with issues of risk and safety. This pattern is therefore worth scrutinizing, even many decades later.

The thesis of Unsafe at Any Speed was that American cars were unsafe because safety was neglected by automobile manufacturers, in order to save on manufacturing costs and not interfere with styling, as some safety devices might. Consumers were depicted as helpless to do anything about safety and therefore as needing government intervention for their protection.

According to Nader, "users of vehicles" are "in no position to dictate safer automobile design." Put differently: "The American automobile is produced exclusively to the standards which the manufacturer decides to establish." More generally, one of the "great problems of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology."

Unsafe at Any Speed was a masterpiece in the art of persuasion, successfully establishing several crucial beliefs about the automobile industry in general, and about the Corvair in particular, without hard evidence being either offered or asked for. The first of these beliefs is that American automobiles are dangerous and becoming more so. As Nader put it, in the first sentence of his preface:

For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people. With Medea-like intensity, this mass trauma began rising sharply four years ago reflecting new and unexpected ravages by the motor vehicle.

Anecdotes and selective quotations abounded to insinuate the conclusions reached, but nowhere did Nader present automobile accident fatality rates in America over time, for the United States versus other countries, for the Corvair versus other automobiles, or for countries where automobiles are produced under capitalist incentives versus countries where the industry is under socialist management. Such data would have supported none of the conclusions reached. The masterpiece was in making such empirical support unnecessary through various rhetorical devices. For example, he quoted a critic who characterized the Corvair as "probably the worst riding, worst all-around handling car available to the American public." and Nader attributed this to "engineering and management operations within General Motors which led to such an unsafe vehicle." Experts who assessed the Corvair and its handling more favorably—some enthusiastically—were of course not quoted.

Despite Nader's sweeping assertions about what had been happening over a period of "half a century," he offered no statistical data covering that span and the data that were available showed long-term trends that were the direct opposite of what Unsafe at Any Speed implied. While it was true, as Nader claimed, that automobile accidents were rising, it was also true that the population of the country was rising, the numbers of cars on the road were rising, and the miles they were traveling were rising. In proportion to population, automobile fatality rates when Unsafe at Any Speed was published in 1965 were less than half of what they had been back in the 1920s. In proportion to millions of vehicle-miles driven, the fatality rate was less than one-third of what it had been in the 1920s.

There are fluctuations in these rates, as with most statistics over long periods of time, and in the years immediately before publication of Unsafe at Any Speed there had been a slight upward trend. But during all the previous decades of presumably helpless consumers, corporate greed, and inadequate government regulation, the safety of American automobiles had been improving dramatically, as shown by fatality rates a fraction of what they had once been, despite more crowded roadways and higher speeds. Yet the continuation of this decades-long trend toward reduced automobile fatality rates was later credited by safety advocates and much of the media to the creation of a federal agency to regulate automobile safety, in response to Ralph Nader's book. This conclusion was reached by the simple expedient of ignoring the previous history and counting the "lives saved" as the long trend of declining fatality rates continued.

What of the Corvair? Here Nader scored his greatest success. The bad publicity he unleashed was reflected in falling sales that forced General Motors to discontinue production of the car. Years later, extensive tests by the U. S. Department of Transportation showed that the Corvair's safety was comparable to that of similar cars of its era, and concluded that the performance of the Corvair "is at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles both foreign and domestic." By then, of course, this information was much too late to matter. The car was extinct—killed off by a safety crusade that set the pattern for later such crusades inspired by Nader's example.

Because of its rear-engine design, the Corvair was indeed more prone to some particular kinds of accidents—and less prone to other kinds of accidents. No matter where an engine is placed, its location affects the physics of the automobile, and therefore the kinds of accidents to which the car is more susceptible and those to which it is less susceptible. Simply by emphasizing the first kinds of accidents—complete with gory examples—and ignoring the second kind, the Corvair could be portrayed as an unsafe car. By similar tactics, almost anything can be made to seem unsafe because ultimately everything is unsafe, if you ignore questions of degree and alternatives.

There are trade-offs not only as regards the placement of an engine, but also as regards the willingness of consumers to pay for all the safety devices that third parties can think of putting on an automobile. However, a trade-off perspective would undermine many, if not most, safety crusades—and not just those about automobiles. Nader dismissed talk of trade-offs as "automobile industry cant"—a rhetorical response making a factual or logical response unnecessary.

Much the same approach has been taken by safety crusaders when it comes to the safety of vaccines and medications, which both save lives and cost lives. No matter how many lives they save, there will still be the inevitable tragedies because some few individuals die as a reaction to being either vaccinated or medicated. (Even a substance as common and generally harmless as peanut butter is literally fatal to some people.) If a particular vaccine is administered to a million children, on most of these children it may have no effect at all—that is, they were not going to catch the disease anyway and they suffer no side effects from the vaccination. But of course no one has any way of knowing in advance which children will be the ones for whom the vaccine will make a difference, one way or another. If 10,000 of those children would have been fatally stricken by the disease from which the vaccine protects them, perhaps 20 will catch that disease from the vaccine itself and die.

Nothing is easier than having a television camera capture the anguish of a mother of one of the 20 dead children, crying and inconsolable in her grief, perhaps blaming herself and wondering aloud whether her child would still be alive if she had not had that child vaccinated. There is no way to know who are the 10,000 other mothers who were spared this anguish because they did have their children vaccinated. Nothing is easier for a safety crusader than denouncing the company that produced an "unsafe" vaccine or medicine, without telling the television viewers that there are no other kinds of vaccines or medications—or anything else.

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It seems to me that it is a tendency for liberals to try to tell people what is good and what is bad but without honest argument on why it is good or bad. They just want people to take their word for it. Making many assertions, most of which are wrong, they talk smoothly with arguments that they think will convince people. Unbiased presentation of the problem and honest thought and analysis is not their style.

8 June 2024