Copyright 2000 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
The Houston Chronicle
August 13, 2000, Sunday 2 STAR EDITION
SECTION: OUTLOOK; Pg. 4
LENGTH: 1274 words
HEADLINE:
Policy based on fear rather than fact is risky business
BYLINE: DAVID ROPEIK; Ropeik is director of risk
communication for the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, in Cambridge, Mass.
BODY:
HUNDREDS of thousands of Americans will die
this year, deaths that can be prevented. Millions will get sick with preventable
illnesses. Billions of dollars and countless hours of effort will be wasted
unnecessarily - all because we're afraid of the wrong things.
In a
frenzy of fear, we're pouring millions this summer into protecting ourselves
from the West Nile virus, and spending only a fraction of that sum on public
education encouraging people to wash their hands, which would eliminate far more
disease transmission than killing every mosquito in America.
Public and
private spending on the clean-up of hazardous waste is estimated at $ 30 billion
a year. Hazardous waste is a real problem, but the number of people whom it puts
at risk is actually quite low. Compare that $ 30 billion with only $ 500 million
a year on programs to reduce smoking, one of the leading preventable causes of
death.
In many areas, science can identify the physical hazards, tell us
how many people are likely to be affected by each one, what various mitigations
will cost and how effective we can expect them to be. We can rank risks and
remedies and put things in perspective. But we don't. Instead, we make policy
based more on fear than fact.
This irrational response kills people. In
a world of finite resources, we can protect ourselves from only so many things.
If we overspend on risks such as pesticides or asbestos, which are real but of
relatively low magnitude, we have less to spend on greater threats such as
bacterial food poisoning or fossil fuel emissions. As a result, thousands of the
people exposed to those higher risks will die.
Bad policy is usually
blamed on politics, greed, the media, even the open, manipulable nature of
democracy itself. True, these are all factors in a process that often becomes a
battle between competing private agendas rather than an informed search for
policies to serve the greatest common good. But the principal underlying cause
of wasteful choices that seek protection from the wrong is fear.
By
definition, fear is more emotional than rational. We fear before we think.
Cognitive scientist Joseph LeDoux of New York University identified neural
pathways that send information about possible hazards to the amygdala, the fear
response center in the ancient core of the brain, before the same information is
sent to the cortex, the newer, thinking, rational part of the brain.
But
society must be more rational than that. When individual fears become group
fears, and when those groups, organized or not, become big enough or visible
enough to put pressure on the government to provide protection from less
dangerous threats, we can end up with policies that leave many people in the way
of harm from higher risks that we're doing less about.
There are some
universal perception factors, identified by social psychologist Paul Slovic and
others, that make us afraid of the same things and thus tend to turn individual
fears into group fears that then foster irrational government policy. Among them
are:
Control vs. no control: You normally feel in control when
you drive, thus are less afraid. Not so when you're an airplane passenger
bumping through turbulence at 30,000 feet.
Immediate/catastrophic vs. chronic: We tend to be more afraid of
what can kill a lot of us suddenly and violently, like a plane crash, than, say,
lung cancer, which causes hundreds of thousands more deaths, but one at a time,
over time.
Natural vs. human-made: We're less afraid of
radiation from the sun than of the radiation from power lines and cell phone
towers, though the risk from the sun is immensely greater. This one helps
explain widespread fear of new technology and chemicals.
Risk
vs. benefit: Medicines often have dangerous side effects, but the more we
perceive a benefit from the drug, the less we fear its risks.
Imposed vs. voluntary: Nonsmokers are often fearful of tobacco
smoke. Smokers usually aren't.
Trust vs. distrust: Experts in
the field say this is often the most important risk perception factor, the
fulcrum on which the whole seesaw of risk perception rests. Our fears subside if
we trust the people informing us about a risk, and if we accept and trust that
risk policies are determined in an open and reasonable process. If we don't
trust the information or the process, our fears rise, as the Pentagon discovered
in the suspicious response of a few service members to its anthrax vaccination
program.
How do we make policy-making more rational? There is a model.
Some years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency and the automobile
industry declared something of a truce in their war over the science of
automobile emissions. Instead of each side spending millions on self-funded
research the other side wouldn't accept, they each put in 50 percent of a total
$ 6 million to create the Health Effects Institute. HEI was created not to make
policy but to give policy-makers credible, trustworthy scientific information on
which rational policy could be based. It was to be an impartial scientific
review board, outside the government. It appoints panels of scientists,
representing their various fields somewhat as a jury represents the community in
a trial, so no one with an ax to grind can control the process. HEI's success
and influence are growing.
Why not create such an independent,
nongovernmental agency - let's call it the Risk Analysis Institute - to provide
credible, trustworthy guidance on risks? The institute would rank hazards so we
could know which are most likely to occur, classify risks according to their
consequences and conduct cost-benefit studies to rank mitigation choices by cost
and effectiveness.
It would also identify the range of remaining
uncertainties, as well as compare the policies of various agencies, to warn when
a policy that reduces risk in one area might increase it in another. For
example, federal government standards to increase fuel
efficiency reduce pollution, but encourage smaller, lighter vehicles,
which are more fuel-efficient but more dangerous for passengers.
Trust
is perhaps the most important of all the risk-perception factors; a government
agency couldn't establish that trust. An institute outside government might. To
that end, it should have as much freedom as possible from the influence of
politics. Its funding should come without strings, ideally from a mix of sources
with competing agendas but willing to invest in credible, sound science. Funds
should also be guaranteed, so no contributor can influence outcomes by
threatening to cut off cash. Its scientific work would have to be carried out by
professionals chosen for their education and training, their expertise and
reputations for integrity, neutrality and open-mindedness - not for their
political friends.
Final policy-making decisions would still be made by
government agencies, preserving citizens' ability to voice their concerns and
use the political process to help shape the outcome.
That means
lobbyists, politics, the media and money would still have influence. The messy
process of policy-making wouldn't change dramatically. But a Risk Analysis
Institute's credible analyses, supporting not a specific policy but rational
policy-making in general, would incrementally move government decision-making
toward wiser, more informed choices.
Injecting rationality into the
process is nothing more than good sense. It's time to create a vehicle to
produce credible, reliable science to help develop policy-making that looks
beyond our fears to what will do the most good.
The longer we wait, the
more we risk.
GRAPHIC: Drawing
TYPE: Editorial Opinion
LOAD-DATE: November 21, 2000 
