Continue reading »]]> Moving house I have discovered 30 copies of this book that I have put on Amazon for £5 – the inducement I need to go to the post office. Below an Amazon review that I quite like.

Amazon Review (*****):

Risk and Freedom is a book of historic significance. Published in 1985 and out of print for many years it continues to have a profound influence on road safety policy. It provides the first coherent application of the concept of “risk compensation” to the management of risk on the road. Risk compensation is a term coined by Canadian psychologist Gerald Wilde in the 1970s to describe the behavioural adjustments of people to perceived changes in safety or danger. In Risk and Freedom Adams applies the idea to a wide variety of road safety measures – seat belts, helmets, speed limits, alcohol limits, highway improvements, crumple zones and other crash protection measures, improved brakes and tires, and accident blackspot treatments, to name the main ones.

The idea that risk compensation could explain the failure of such measures to achieve their promised benefits was, at the time, unanimously dismissed out of hand by highway engineers, vehicle designers, and regulators. Today it is widely accepted as mere common sense, and serves as the basis for the new, and increasingly popular, shared space schemes. The most obvious explanation for the success of these schemes is Adams’ argument that road users are not obedient automatons, but alert and responsive participants in what Adams calls in his last book, Risk, “the dance of the risk thermostats”. Also, unlike most books on this subject it is well-written and entertaining.

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Letter NOT published in the Guardian. Submitted 30 April.

My two favorite commentators on the subject of risk have fallen out. Simon Jenkins (29 April) predicts that swine flu will end up with bird flu and Sars in the category of over-hyped scare that never happened. Ben Goldacre (30 April) says that if Simon turns out to be right he wont have been right, just lucky – a swine flu pandemic is a real risk.

 They are discussing what risk geeks call a low-frequency high-impact event. Chances are that Simon will be proved right/lucky. If you bet against every hypothetical low-frequency high impact event that might happen you will be right/lucky most of the time. Many are hypothesized, few materialize.

 The hypotheses that bird flu or Sars could have been, or swine flu might be, as catastrophic as the 1918 flu epidemic were not, and are not, implausible.  But they can be assigned low statistical probabilities. What should governments do when confronted with such threats? How much should they spend in the form of money, time and economic disruption to defend against them? Building defenses against low probability threats incurs opportunity costs; chances are the money could be spent elsewhere more effectively.

 Consider a much lower frequency much higher impact event – a catastrophic collision between earth and an asteroid. It has happened and will do again. In the world’s present state we can but afford to shrug fatalistically. Straining every economic, scientific and technological sinew to defend against it would steal resources from, and thereby inhibit, a wide range of activities that might ultimately build an economy in which asteroid defense would be affordable.

On swine flu I’m betting with Simon, but will continue to cheer Ben on every Saturday.

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I began my inaugural blog on this website – On becoming Vashti – as follows: “My nomination for the most prescient work of science fiction is The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.”

A recent comment on this posting by a former student, June Gibbons, has prompted a further re-reading of The Machine Stops. With each re-reading Forster becomes more prescient. When I wrote my inaugural blog I had not anticipated the sub-prime-credit-crunch. But Forster had:

“No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished.”

A better description of our current mess I have yet to find. The efficiency of the mechanism for creating and disseminating toxic derivatives was impressive. Understanding of the devastation they would spread was absent. Those “master brains” in whom we all wanted to believe because they were making us richer, did not perish. They never existed. They were, with beguiling gravitas, blowing a bubble; “no one confessed the Machine was out of hand.”

As a guide to the past, and present, and possibly the future, I cannot recommend Then Machine Stops too highly.

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John Adams and (even older – positively venerable) Mayer Hillman are looking for a younger enthusiast to carry on a research project that Mayer and Anne Whalley began at the Policy Studies Institute. In 1971, they conducted a survey of English children’s independent mobility – how they got to school, visited friends and so on, whether they were allowed to get about and use public transport on their own and, if they owned a bicycle, to ride it on public roads, and how they spent the weekend previous to the survey. Parents also were involved by completing a questionnaire about the age up to which they imposed personal mobility restrictions on their children, and the reasons for doing so.

These surveys were repeated in the same schools in 1990 (published as One False Move … and available online at http://john-adams.co.uk/books/). This follow-up study disclosed a dramatic loss of children’s independence over the previous 19 years. For instance, in 1971, 80% of 7 and 8-year old children got to school unaccompanied by an adult but by 1990 this proportion had fallen to 9%. With the collaboration of John Whitelegg, then at the Wuppertal Institute, matching surveys to provide a cultural comparison were conducted in West Germany. This revealed that, compared with the English, children there enjoyed a significantly higher level of independence.

Now, close on 20 years later, we think it would be instructive to conduct the surveys again to produce a 40-year review and to extend the comparison to other European countries to widen understanding of the influence of culture. The study would be an opportunity to chronicle the changes in children’s independent mobility and the possible relationship this has had with their physical and emotional development. It would also help to explain the social significance of children’s loss of what could be described as a right and enable lessons to be learned from wider international comparisons with the experience, behaviour and attitudes of children and parents in other countries.

We offer our services as eminences grises (John thinks he is beyond grise and that Mayer is preternaturally ungrise) to assist/guide whoever might be interested in continuing what we believe to be an important area of policy-relevant research. We are looking for someone to coordinate the European dimension of the proposal (we can provide introductions to other potential collaborators in other countries on the Continent) and someone who would conduct the surveys of children and parents in the English schools involved in the earlier surveys – this could be developed into an interesting PhD project. Of course, the two ‘someones’ could be the same person.

Anyone tempted, please contact Mayer in the first instance at mayer.hillman@blueyonder.co.uk.

Continue reading »]]> Most risk assessments, warning notices and disclaimers are the legal equivalent of juju charms to ward off lawyers – and probably as effective as the kind that believers wear around their necks. This disclaimer for Nelson Rocks Preserve in West Virginia was sent to me by Paul Winston, editorial director of Business Insurance . It is the most comprehensive I have seen.

It begins
“WARNING

Nature is unpredictable and unsafe. Mountains are dangerous. Many books have been written about these dangers, and there’s no way we can list them all here. Read the books.” For the full disclaimer click here .

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Arboricultural Journal 2007, Vol. 30, pp. 95–103

 This is the published version of a paper prepared for a conference on The Future of Tree Risk Management, held in London on 15 September 2006.

 Abstract
Britain, in the view of former Prime Minister Blair, is “in danger of having a wholly disproportionate attitude to the risks we should expect to run as a normal part of life. … The result is a plethora of  rules, guidelines, responses to ‘scandals’ of one nature or another that ends up having utterly perverse consequences.” My introduction to the world of tree risk management in Britain leads me to the conclusion that it is disproportionately risk averse and is having “utterly perverse consequences”. Read full article (PDF)

Continue reading »]]> Draft for WHO Workshop, Rome, 13-14 December 2007. The cost of inaction: economic valuation in environment and health.

Contemplation of the costs of inaction usually provokes questions about the benefits of inaction, which leads to cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis, as a method for settling arguments about action or inaction is enormously seductive. You simply add up the benefits of doing something and subtract the costs and if the result is positive you have a case for doing it. What could be wrong with that? In practice quite a lot. ….

The cost of inaction, the title of this workshop, implies the existence of a set of problems within WHO’s sphere of responsibility in which conventional methods of economic evaluation will be able to convince those responsible for taking action that the benefits of action will outweigh the costs. I have my doubts. Read full paper .

Continue reading »]]> In 1971 Mayer Hillman conducted a survey of how English children got about: at what age were they allowed to play in the street, ride a bike, get to school on their own, visit friends and get about the neighbourhood? In 1990 Mayer persuaded me to join him in re-surveying the same schools he had visited in 1971. We discovered a change even more dramatic than we had anticipated. In 1971 80% of 7 and 8 year old children got to school unaccompanied by an adult. By 1990 this had dropped to 9%. The report of the 1990 survey, documenting the demise of the free-range child between 1971 and 1990, is now available online – One False Move … a study of children’s independent mobility
Since 1990 for children things have got much worse. Two new reports document the continuing loss of children’s traditional independence and, one hopes, will inspire a counter-revolution: No Fear- growing up in a risk averse society by Tim Gill , and Risk and Childhood , by Nicola Madge and John Barker.