A thought experiment.
Suppose I were to tell you that there were a new technology available that would significantly reduce your commuting time, provide more (and individual) flexibility in your schedule, and allow you to travel further and faster than you have ever travelled before. This new technology would transform the design and development of cities, making them more efficient and the technology would provide goods to markets that were previously unreachable, in astounding time, significantly reducing poverty and providing ready access to basic needs for all. If asked, would you vote to provide some public funding for the development of the new technology?
The personal costs of the technology would not be trivial. Depending on the desired amenities, the new technology would require an upfront private investment by consumers of $20,000-$35,000 on average and $1,500 per year in inputs for continued consumption. The life of the technology is approximately 5-10 years, depending on intensity of use, at which point a new investment will be necessary.
And the technology is not without costs to others. Suppose I were to tell you that this new supertechnology would be a superpolluter. The new technology would significantly worsen air quality and require dependence on foreign countries for inputs into production and prolonged consumption. The production of the technology would require significant shifts in manufacturing costing some states tens of thousands of jobs. The concentrated manufacturing process would provide a financial windfall for a few while creating thousands of low-skill low-wage jobs and ultimately result in those jobs being created in oversees markets.
Now, if asked, would you vote to provide some public funding for the development of the new technology?
Before answering, let's finish the scenario. The consumption of this new technology comes with risks. High risks. Full adoption of this technology would result in the direct death of 90-100 people per day on average (~35,000 people per year). During times of peak consumption, the death toll would rise to 500 people per day. In addition, prolonged consumption and the associated degradation of air quality in concentrated use areas would result in the thousands of indirect deaths per year.
Now, if asked, would you vote to provide some public funding for the development of the new technology?
My precautionary senses tell me that this vote on this new technology would fail. I get the sense that a new technology that results in 35,000 direct deaths per year in the U.S. would fail to pass any vote, no matter the benefit.
Yet, we continue to drive and balk at safer, greener, alternatives as unsafe.
Here's how Chris Turner at the Mother Nature Network puts it:
Still, there was a collision on a train track in China that made headlines the world over last weekend, and it produced headline after headline containing the words high-speed rail and unsafe in close proximity, and this has created a climate of general suspicion sufficient, for example, to cause shares in Canada’s leading rail-equipment maker to plummet. And so now the entire notion of fast trains – even beyond China’s borders – is likely to seem risky for some time.There are two factors at work here, problematic for our ability to gauge risk in isolation but devastating in tandem. They regularly cloud our collective ability to make big decisions about public policy issues such as transportation infrastructure. The two factors are novelty and availability.The first – novelty – is particularly important to the way we gather and disseminate news. The news media thrives on novelty, especially in its current incarnation as a multiheaded, digitized noise machine addicted to the latest breaking thing, tweeted and posted and maybe (but increasingly rarely) eventually analyzed and contextualized in a news cycle that now seems mere minutes long some days.The fact that 90 or more Americans die on the highways every day is not news in and of itself, because it is not new. Even the finer details about deadly holiday weekends – the Fourth of July and New Year’s Day are the worst in the U.S., but the first weekend in August occupies the fourth, seventh and eleventh most dangerous driving dates on the calendar – are unremarkable. Sure, the higher risk is sometimes reported ahead of holiday weekends, but it’s reported in the same tone, really, as the weather. Sometimes troubling, but predictable and unavoidable and necessary to the functioning of our societies.A collision of high-speed trains, though? Even ones on the other side of the world, in a place whose domestic affairs rarely make the news? There’s your novelty, and that’s what makes headlines.So never mind that 39 people dying in a nation of a billion-plus in a one-off accident actually has much less relevance and indicates far less risk than 120 or so dying in motor vehicle fatalities in the nation of 300 million you live in the day after tomorrow. That won’t be news. The grand total likely won’t even be reported. But rest assured if a fast-moving train plows into another one anywhere on Earth, it’ll be a top story.The deeper problem this creates is what behavioral economists call “availability bias.” Availability bias is what makes the world seem more dangerous even as crime rates plummet across North America – because there are many more news media outlets than ever before, offering increasingly graphic and lurid detail about the violent crime that does happen. And it’s what makes fast trains seem more dangerous than the car in your garage. If there’s a frame of reference readily available to you – something you’ve recently encountered in the news or experienced directly – it will make that event seem much more likely than it actually is to happen again in the near future.
