On the occasion of being named a Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis, for which I am very grateful, I am posting here one of the earliest pieces I wrote on risk science, a short essay from 1995. It was prepared an an op-ed for the Globe and Mail (Toronto). My views have evolved since then but the basic themes stand: risk-aversion being a direct function of how secure members of a society feel, the neglect of occupational health risks compared to other risks, and the idea of acceptable risk.
According to a recent survey commissioned by Health Canada (Globe and Mail, 13 April 1995, p. A1) more than 60% of Canadians believe that “a risk-free environment is an obtainable goal in Canada” but only 19% of experts in chemical hazards agree with them. This result tells us that the majority of our fellow citizens are kidding themselves that life can be lived without risk. However, we knew that already.
Canadians in the survey seem to reject the notion that we have to accept risk in our daily lives. Of course, we still drive our cars, give birth, play sports, and do what we have to do to make life worth living, as if we simply deny that there are risks involved. The surprise is that as a society we appear to want risk in some situations but not in others.
Canada, like all highly developed societies, is becoming more risk-aversive, more litigious, and more competitive. We used to be a post-frontier and largely rural society, vividly recalling a heritage of risk-taking for future gain and to some extent glorifying it. However, in the course of settling into a more urban and cosmopolitan reality, our attitude has changed.
This attitude reflects many social trends. One is that as we live longer, the things that we do and that we are exposed to are more likely to catch up with us – most obviously, those things that cause cancer. Another trend is that as we grow more affluent, we have more to lose. The tolerance of society for risks that are not voluntarily accepted is vanishing. This would be anathema to our grandparents and great grandparents, who not only accepted risk as part of life but may have contributed to building the country out of wilderness. For them, risk meant opportunity.
Our sense of justice has become so refined that we seek reasons for placing the blame on others when bad things happen to us. Canadians, like other sophisticated and urbanized people, have become preoccupied with equity issues: what is fair, who is responsible, and how can I get my claim recognized? At its extreme, this may become a cult of the victim, but in moderation it is a sign of healthy a society with so much to lose that it shies away from dumb risks, like drinking and driving. The consequence is that people sue more, they blame their employers more, and they are far less tolerant of ignorance as an excuse when something goes wrong. But they also quit smoking, watch their diet, and live longer.
Risk still means opportunity in some aspects of life. In financial markets, we accept that higher risk may mean higher potential earnings, to compensate the risk-taker. In business, the rebirth of the entrepreneurial spirit that is now upon us encourages us to take risks with our savings and our future, rather than stagnate as mere salaried employees. We restructure health care, welfare, regulation, and other government functions so radically that it is called a “revolution”, and we do so in ways that increase our own risk if anything goes wrong and we may need these services ourselves later.
These new risks have one thing in common: they are all self-imposed social risks that we accept as a society because we think (we hope) that it will make us more competitive, make our jobs more productive, and make our lives more secure in the future. And then, as if to prove that we are human and therefore self-contradictory, we ignore risks that could save us money, pain, and lost opportunity.
For example, we are very little concerned, as a society, with occupational health and safety. Ironically, job safety and health protection involve some of the same chemical hazards that we worry about in the environment, and yet we think about them very differently. And yet, this is one big area of risk that for most of us is a big yawn, at least until there is a catastrophe like the Wesray mine disaster. Then we sit up, shiver, thank God we do not work in a coal mine, and go back to sleep again when the story fades.
Canada has the worst overall occupational injury performance in the OECD, a trend not at all explained by extremes of weather or our resource-intensive economy because even workers in retail sales have higher injury rates. These figures are not just of concern because of their current impact on our society. They are alarming because they suggest a serious handicap to future productivity and compromise our future competitiveness. They suggest that a substantial share of the wealth we create is diverted to nonproductive uses, required just to correct the problems we create for ourselves. This proportion of our new wealth is no longer available to improve the quality of our lives or to enhance our ability to compete in the future. Perhaps we are so conditioned to believe that risk equals opportunity, that we cannot see that here risk means loss.
As a society, we tend to favour action to control unfamiliar hazards such as chemical carcinogens and electromagnetic fields. However, these relatively exotic hazards may be trivial in their implications for health compared to unsafe working conditions and the old familiar health hazards such as noise, lead, and solvents. Perhaps we have been lulled into complacency by our relative success at controlling asbestos exposure, everyone’s model occupational exposure. The reality is that the modern workplace is sometimes dangerous not because of new and exotic hazards but because of neglect of the old ones.
If we were serious about controlling hazards that create unnecessary risk in our lives, we would rank all the hazards we face and control those we could, not just the most recently publicized ones. We would get excited about traffic safety and worry a lot less about electromagnetic fields. The way our society deals with risk says a lot about who we are, what we believe, and how easily we get carried away by the headlines. Risk has its place in life, like everything else, but like everything else, we would like it to work for us and not against us. A healthy society minimizes the risks of the things it fears most and maximizes risks that create fair opportunity.
At the time that this was written, in 1995, Tee L. Guidotti was professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Alberta.