Public Understanding and Risk in Social Activities
In the real world, many government agencies, e.g. Health and Safety Executive, are fundamentally risk-averse in their mandate. This often means that they demand (with the power of legal enforcement) that risks be minimized, even at the cost of losing the utility of the risky activity. It is important to consider the opportunity cost when mitigating a risk; the cost of not taking the risky action. Writing laws focused on the risk without the balance of the utility may misrepresent society's goals. The public understanding of risk, which influences political decisions, is an area which has recently been recognised as deserving focus. David Spiegelhalter is the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University; a role he describes as "outreach".
A vaccine to protect children against the three common diseases measles, mumps and rubella was developed and recommended for all children in several countries including the UK. However, a controversy arose around allegations that it caused autism. This alleged causal link was thoroughly disproved, and the doctor who made the claims was expelled from the General Medical Council. Even years after the claims were disproved, some parents wanted to avert the risk of causing autism in their own children. They chose to spend significant amounts of their own money on alternatives from private doctors. These alternatives carried their own risks which were not balanced fairly; most often that the children were not properly immunised against the more common diseases of measles, mumps and rubella.
Mobile phones may carry some small health risk. While most people would accept that unproven risk to gain the benefit of improved communication, others remain so risk averse that they do not. (The COSMOS cohort study continues to study the actual risks of mobile phones.)
Risk aversion theory can be applied to many aspects of life and its challenges, for example:
- Bribery and corruption - whether the risk of being implicated or caught outweighs the potential personal or professional rewards
- Drugs - whether the risk of having a bad trip outweighs the benefits of possible transformative one; whether the risk of defying social bans is worth the experience of alteration. See "Harm reduction".
- Sex - judgement whether an experience that goes against social convention, ethical mores or common health prescriptions is worth the risk.
- Extreme sports - weighing the risk of physical injury or death against the adrenaline rush and bragging rights.
- Play by children in playgrounds or beyond the reach of their parents.
Read more about this topic: Risk Aversion
Famous quotes containing the words public, risk, social and/or activities:
“... until both employers’ and workers’ groups assume responsibility for chastising their own recalcitrant children, they can vainly bay the moon about “ignorant” and “unfair” public criticism. Moreover, their failure to impose voluntarily upon their own groups codes of decency and honor will result in more and more necessity for government control.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don’t count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)