Foolproof Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Foolproof

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Zusammenfassung von Foolproof

Name: Foolproof
Author: Greg Ip

Greg Ip

Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe

14 Min.

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Culture

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Foolproof
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What’s in it for me? Learn how to foolproof your life.

We’ve all heard the story of how greedy banks, a rapacious financial sector and the lack of regulation caused the financial crisis of 2007–2008. But what if that’s not the whole story? What if it was actually the measures taken by governments to keep the economy safe which caused the crisis?

As these blinks will show you, many of the things we do to make ourselves safer actually end up making us less safe. This is because they can lull us into a false sense of security. And then, when we least expect it, disaster strikes.

So what should we do instead?

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how helmets actually made football more dangerous;
how an economic crisis helped Thailand; and
why pilots need space.

Sometimes, the safer we feel, the more we’re actually in danger.

Although safety regulations are put in place to protect us, they can sometimes do quite the opposite. How can this be?

When we make risky activities safer, we engage in them more often. Take driving a car, for example. In the late 1970s, anti-lock brakes were introduced in Germany to improve control over the car while braking. The government expected that this new safety mechanism would decrease the rate of fatal automobile accidents by 10 to 15 percent. Soon after, though, a study found that drivers in cars fitted with anti-lock brakes were more likely to engage in risky driving, such as driving faster and braking harder than drivers with no anti-lock brakes.

Further research found that, as drivers were placing a little too much faith in their new-fangled brakes, they were rounding curves more quickly, which increased the rate of rollovers and accidents when exiting roads.

A similar thing happened in American football. When helmets became mandatory attire in American football in 1943, the overall risk of injury was expected to go down. On the one hand, the helmets decreased the amount of broken jaws, teeth and noses. However, spinal and concussion-related injuries actually increased, with more than a 400 percent increase in broken necks.

The reason behind these disturbing statistics was said to be that, as the players felt more shielded, they began using their helmets as battering rams against the opposition!

The same happened in ice hockey too; when helmets were made mandatory in 1979, the prevalence of head fractures decreased while spinal injuries went up.

Although stability can make us feel safe, it can be deceptive.

Just as helmets made football and hockey more dangerous, the introduction of safety measures to stabilize our economies inadvertently helped cause the financial crisis that began in the late 2000s. But how exactly?

In an attempt to deal with economic instability decades earlier, the US Federal Reserve averted a recession and, in doing so, laid the foundations for the 2007–2008 financial crisis.

It’s human behavior, not Mother Nature, that increases the damage inflicted by disasters.

As we’ve seen, the preventive measures we put in place can bring about unforeseen trouble, even disaster. And this doesn’t just apply to the world of finance.

In an attempt to avoid natural disasters, we often end up exacerbating the damage caused by future disasters. Take forest fires. The advent of forest management undoubtedly helped save lives and extinguish fires. However, it’s also one reason why forest fires are more extreme than they used to be.

It’s often better to accept the risk of disasters or crises than to try to preempt them.

Just as it’s better to let smaller fires burn out on their own to avoid flammable forest debris building up, experts assert that it may do more good in the long term to accept that systemic risk is a part of life.

Moreover, there are actually benefits to doing nothing at all to prevent crises.

Sometimes the more in danger we feel, the safer we actually are.

Was Shakespeare right when he had Ophelia say to Hamlet, “the best safety lies in fear”? Could living in fear be the answer to protecting ourselves?

Most people fear activities like nuclear power generation and air travel, because they feel inherently dangerous: when things go wrong, disaster ensues and lives are lost.

We have to strike a balance between limiting danger and accepting the inherent risks we encounter in today’s world.

We’ve seen how trying to foolproof our existence can make us engage in dangerous behavior, and that we sometimes feel secure when we’re really at risk. But no one wants to feel constantly in danger, so it makes sense to opt for a balance between risk and security.

If an activity is inherently very risky, sometimes not engaging in it at all is better than trying to make it safe. This is illustrated by the zero-tolerance attitude to volcanic ash in air travel, but also in the world of finance as exhibited by the measures Toronto Dominion Bank (TD) took in 2005 to effectively eliminate risks from their business practices. As was standard practice at the time, TD was more concerned with buying up stocks, bonds and derivatives rather than traditional lending. But as it dawned on their CEO that the success of this practice relied on its inherent riskiness, he decided to cease trading in derivatives. In retrospect, this was smart thinking, as the bank, along with the Canadian banking sector, was only slightly harmed by the 2007–2008 financial collapse.

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Worum geht es in Foolproof?

Why do one third of Americans fear flying? After all, statistics show that you’re 1,330 times more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash. Are we taking the wrong measures to truly stay safe? Foolproof (2015) explains why taking excessive precautions against danger can have terrible consequences, and why sometimes when we feel most in danger, we are actually quite safe.

Wer Foolproof lesen sollte

Students of risk management
Anyone interested in what caused the 2007–2008 financial crisis
People who are sick of that so-called “health and safety culture”

Über den Autor

Greg Ip is an award-winning reporter and chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Little Book of Economics.

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