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...to protect the public from worst case dangers. Those claims ignore what is probable and what defenses cost. They exaggerate the danger our enemies pose and strip resources from more probable dangers, making us less safe. Surrounded by the demons of possibility, the American public perceives a menacing and chaotic world that is mostly fiction.
Consider war a species of risk, danger, or uncertainty. We are not accustomed to that perspective. The theories that inform the study of political violence are not those that guide regulation of health and safety. The Defense Department is not considered to be in the same business as the Food and Drug Administration. But we can glean insights into our defenses from debate about regulatory policy. We can reveal choices among dangers hidden by talk of uncertainty and consider their cause.
RISK AND PREFERENCE
Students of regulatory policy know of the precautionary principle, an idea about risk favored by advocates of various health and environmental regulations. The concept can be stated as follows: Whenever some activity poses a possible risk to health, safety, or the environment, the government should take preventive action. Government intervention is warranted even if the evidence that the activity is harmful is uncertain and the cost of preventive action is high.
In Laws of the Fear, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein demonstrates that the precautionary principle is incoherent. The principle fails to acknowledge that decisions about risk, whether they regulate health hazards or arm against a state, cannot deal with one risk alone. Because resources are always limited, efforts to head off a particular danger take resources away from other government programs and from private investment that also reduce risk. Also, because of unintended consequences, actions that prevent one danger can create new ones. If we took the precautionary principle seriously, we would have to be cautious about all the dangers a particular decision touches. That includes the danger of doing nothing. Taken literally, the principle prevents all action and inaction, making it useless.
States often ignore this logical failure and apply the precautionary principle to particular hazards. Sunstein argues that in many of those cases, precautionary action will be more harmful to society than running the risk. Those are cases where the danger is small and the cost of prevention is large.
The use of asbestos as building insulation is an example. When contained in walls, asbestos is harmless. If the materials containing it deteriorate, however, the asbestos might be inhaled or ingested and, in very rare cases, could cause respiratory diseases including lung cancer. The precautionary principle can be evoked by those demanding the material's removal. But removal creates new cancer risks and its cost is enormous. Whoever bears it, that cost will take money away from other risk-reducing uses, be it savings, health care, or education. Removal harms society more than leaving the asbestos in place. Another example is genetically modified foods. European regulators argue that the uncertain risks of genetically modified crops justify limiting trade flows and the resulting higher prices on consumers. They exchange an uncertain risk for a sure one.
The illogic of the precautionary principle does not mean that states should not regulate against uncertain dangers. The point is that dangers should be evaluated by cost-benefit analysis. This means that decisions about risk should consider the cost that preventive action would avert, the likelihood that preventive action will work, and the action's cost. Decisionmakers should also consider, as Sunstein notes, not just total costs and benefits, but the equity of their distribution.
The problem with cost-benefit analysis is that it relies on unavailable information about the magnitude and likelihood of the harm. Everyone would agree to head off disaster at low cost and to avoid costly defenses against tiny dangers. Everyone agrees that research is helpful to getting policy right. But some degree of uncertainty is hard to extinguish. You never know, some will say, what the true cost is of asbestos as insulation. If science is never complete, cost-benefit analysis is impossible.
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The problem with this critique of cost-benefit analysis is that its virtue does not depend on getting rid of uncertainty. Analysts use cost-benefit analysis to get all the potential costs into the debate and force recognition of choice. They show that the pursuit of perfect safety, of chasing a danger out of existence, creates other dangers.
This point shows why debate about the precautionary principle is often phony. Inherent uncertainty means that the decisions about risk are likely to be made by some criteria other than a principle about risk. That criterion will be a prior political preference--in the case of genetically modified foods, probably protection of domestic producers.
Critics of the precautionary principle charge that it is a justification for regulation, not its cause--that the principle's defenders care more about the environment than other public goods. Defenders of the principle claim that cost-benefit analysis serves corporate bottom lines. They are both part right.
Fights about regulating risks are about which risks to confront and which to accept, not about how much risk to accept. All government policies ultimately reduce one risk or another. Politics is competition between risk preferences.
Societies are not consistent in their approach to dangers. They are precautionary about certain risks and acceptant of others. Americans are less fearful--less precautionary--than Europeans about global warming and genetically modified foods. We are more cautious about secondhand smoke, drug approval, and nuclear proliferation. The differences cannot be justified by objective appeals to science.
Scholars offer various explanations for the origins of those preferences. In Risk and Culture, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky argued that culture causes risk perception. They claimed that groups are organized by preferences about what dangers ought to be confronted collectively and that the rise of new political coalitions brings new priorities about danger. University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic points to people's psychological tendencies to react to certain risks--such as those that are novel or involve a perceived loss of control and the way those perceptions spread by social interaction and media. MIT's Harvey Sapolsky argues that risk perception results from the balance of the various special interests that benefit from society either confronting or running the risk. The groups compete to guide public opinion about danger. The variance in the balance of interest groups' power across countries explains their variant reaction to risks. Whatever their origin, political...
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