Gregory's ServerThe major casualty of this abuse wasn't the millions spent on tombstone reinforcement or the absurdity of wearing a helmet for Peter Pan's flight - it was the discrediting of the very idea of evidence-based safety.
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 But long before the British health-and-safety wheeze, American corporate apologists were weaponizing safety talk, led by Sam Peltzman an economist at (where else) the University of Chicago. In 1975, Peltzman published a landmark study that purported to finally validate the #RiskCompensation hypothesis: the idea that when you make things safer, people engage in riskier behavior, with overall safety declining as a result. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/260352 8/ Peltzman's paper was intended as an evidence-based rejoinder to seatbelt laws - laws that auto manufacturers vehemently opposed. But there was just one problem: Peltzman's paper was "riddled with errors" and Peltzman did not perform "rudimentary checks on the validity of his model." https://www.mdpi.com/2313-576X/2/3/16/htm Peltzman was wrong, but he was also useful. 9/ As Tim Requarth writes in Slate, Peltzman's ideas failed to stop seatbelts, but the did lead to widespread motorcycle helmet law repeals - and a wave of fatalities and maimings. Risk compensation does occur in very narrow and specific circumstances, but all the studies purporting to show that it is a widespread, predictable outcome of any safety regulation have failed to replicate. 10/ But just as health-and-safety panic served a useful purpose, so does risk compensation fraud: it serves as an unassailable justification for both big-business-freindly deregulation and authoritarian sex-negativity. Risk compensation helps corporations that want to avoid retooling to comply with safety measures, such as fight child safety caps on medicine: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7556/jaoa.2006.106.7.405/html 11/ Risk compensation is also the excuse of choice to fight drug-related harm reduction, especially needle exchanges ("if we give addicts clean needles, they'll shoot up more"): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3936850/ Risk compensation and health-and-safety panic are both part of a safety nihilism campaign that serves big business's deregulatory agenda, and the cruel moralizing of right wing religious maniacs, the traditional turkeys-voting-for-Christmas coalition. 13/ But risk compensation is especially salient in these covid days, where it's being used to fight rapid testing ("encourages risky behavior"). The problem isn't the difficulty of formulating good health and safety policy, though that difficulty is real. The problem is that, having ruled health policy to be above question or scrutiny, we invite paternalism and authoritarianism. 14/ Whether it's a noble lie, a grift, a moral panic, or a deregulatory fraud, abuse of safety rhetoric always comes to light. When it does, it discredits the whole project of evidence-based safety. And *that* is truly an unsafe situation. eof/ |
You can trace a straight path from turning health and safety into a punchline to the Grenfell fire and the national epidemic of lethally flammable building cladding. Every time someone brought up the possibility that it might be a bad idea to sheathe high-rises in, basically, solid-state gasoline, they were jeered at as "health and safety" weirdos.
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