09 Feb Why we make so many bad decisions in the name of safety

Yesterday I decried the decision to close most mainland Nova Scotia schools, all mainland universities, and as of 1 pm, when nary a flake was yet falling in Halifax, all Nova Scotia Government offices. The post touched a nerve, and I’ll be discussing the issue tonight at 6:30 with Steve Murphy on CTV-Atlantic.

I was critical of school boards, Environment Canada, and the media, because all three bear responsibility for our over-reaction to routine storms—or in yesterday’s case, storms that have not yet happened. The problem is much broader than storm days however, and the fault goes well beyond those three culprits.

We are terrible at making personal decisions about safety and security. We take crazy precautions to avoid trivial risks, and show foolhardy indifference to clear and present dangers. We stay home when there’s an inch of snow (despite $1000 worth of snow tires on our cars), but we text madly as we fly down a 100-series highway.

It’s not just personal decisions. As a society, we structure decision-making around safety and security in ways that encourage decision-makers to look at only one side of what are actually complex and subtle equations. As a result, we don’t get balanced decisions.

This is why it has proven almost impossible to roll back the crazy precautions that were put in place after 9/11 to protect commercial airplanes, even though they cost our economy billions, and no serious security expert believes they make flying safer.

No politician dares stare down the security-industrial complex, because the next time something bad happens on an airplane, as it inevitably will, the politician will be crucified. It’s so much easier to just go along with bad policy than make oneself a target for the next incident.

Consider the hapless transportation managers who made yesterday’s decision to call off school the day before the storm. They had no mandate to weigh the cost their decision would impose on society. No one asked them to think about the terrible subliminal message it sends students to give up in the face of challenges. They thought only about how grass their ass would be in the unlikely event a bus slid off a road.

They didn’t even stop to ask how safe the children would be at home for the day, in ad hoc care arrangements, at a friend’s house, a movie theatre, or a ski hill. Decisions about school bus safety are judged against a non-existent perfect world in which children face zero risk as long as they don’t set foot aboard a school bus.

In far too many cases, we abdicate decision-making to insurance companies. They have literally no interest in weighing social factors to reach balanced decisions. Their only interest is to limit corporate risk. The kids could be playing Russian roulette in a crack house for all they care, as long as they are not on a bus insured by the company.

Society ends up shouldering the tangible and intangible  costs of not having considered other factors. Think how many soccer/hockey/little league programs have been complicated or prevented by witless insurance requirements.

This is a social problem. Parents no longer let their children out of their sight, because of mostly imaginary fears about bad things that might happen but probably won’t. As a result, children arrive at university, community college, or the world of work without ever having made a decision about their personal safety.