Diligent readers know how I hate the evil Precautionary Principle:

My professional concern about PP is that far from promoting policy common sense it can diminish it.

Take the refurbishment of the British Ambassador’s residence in Belgrade back in 2001. The building had been neglected during the long Milosevic years. Everything which could be painted was either Excrement Brown or Rose Pink. The main reception room looked like the forlorn warehouse where all the worst sofas and curtains in the FCO crawled away to die in shame.

So it was agreed that we should upgrade things in the next couple of years. But we had not reckoned with "what if" PP as articulated by the FCO works people…

One idea we had was to remove the vile dark sticky polish and ugly carpets from the original nice woodblock floors and go for a lightly coloured, varnished modern look. But when we asked for this to be done along the upstairs landing we met: "what if a child skids and shoots up and over the landing and plummets down and dies?!"

We asked for the kitchen to have something other than industrial strip lighting, to make it a more pleasant place to work. "What if one of the cooks is ill and cuts himself and drips infected blood into food being prepared for a member of the Royal Family?!"

Work began to replace the nasty tin sentry box for our local staff Serb security team with a small brick building. I happened to stop by and asked why the roof was such a fatuous design. "It is being made of reinforced concrete. What if terrorists attack and try to break in through the ceiling?"

In each case I had to order them all to stop being ridiculous and come to a calm, elegant solution. Had I not done so the taxpayer probably would have had a worse and more expensive outcome.

Yet countless stupidities are not stopped. How does one cost this mess?

The Health and Safety industry is just the armed wing of the Emotional Correctness tendency. The issue is not about which standards in fact apply: it’s about controlling who decides, and who then enforces.

Next time you hear someone emoting correctly on BBC that "even if we save only one life, the extra cost is worth it", just scream RUBBISH – LIAR.

Every day we make a totally different calculation, that some lives will be lost for wider social utility: we don’t impose a 5 mph speed-limit. Likewise in the NHS we actually deliberately let some people die to save money for others. For state/NHS bean-counters, that’s not a bug – it’s a key feature.

These issues are all about risk management. Take building safety codes. The ‘higher’ the safety standards (more fire staircases, more sprinkler systems etc) the costlier the building. This will lead to fewer ‘safer’ buildings being built and/or displace some people into older, less ‘safe’ buildings. We can measure what we can measure. The necessary displacement effects are no less real, but hard to calculate so get left out.

Here via Instapundit is a superb article (click on the ecgi button) about the way different New York safety standards down the decades may or may not have contributed to casualty levels on 9/11. Were the World Trade Centre towers well built because so many people in fact escaped? Or were they badly built because so many people ended up trapped in the floors above the planes’ impact?

It prompts this comment from Steve Postrel:

The economist’s perspective: If you never have an accident or disaster, your precautions are too strict. One Triangle fire and one WTC disaster over the observed timespan may well be optimal or too few when balanced against the present value of the costs of having codes strict enough to prevent such tragedies.

If you prefer not to put dollar values on human life, shift to risk/risk analysis and note that a) wealthier is generally healthier, b) building codes add to costs and reduce real wealth (gross of the prevented losses), and therefore c) building codes strict enough to prevent ever having something like the WTC collapse may well kill more people over time than the collapse itself. Or you can look at how costlier building codes lead to an increase in the average age of structures (all else equal) and so may result in more people spending time in older, less-safe buildings.

You’d need to do detailed empirical work to tell what the magnitudes are for these effects; possibly the optimum safety level is more stringent than what we have now. My armchair guess is that it goes the other way, though.

The classic socialist way to deal with such questions is that state bureaucrats decide. Their calculations and risk-management analyses stay well hidden, leaving the whole business open to corrupt ‘regulatory capture’ by different untransparent greedy vested interests (corporations, NGOs).

Why not let markets have far more of a role by pushing risk on to people, not rules?

Example.

Prices in Tesco are higher than they need to be, to pass on to all of us the cost of Tesco insuring itself against idiotic tort litigation brought by someone slipping on a spilled yoghurt. This need no longer be the case: it’s an information management problem, highly suited to new IT.

Thus I could sign a long-term agreement with Tesco promising not to sue them for negligence in a long list of circumstances. In return for that assurance, Tesco would need lower insurance premiums and so could offer me lower prices. In other words, those people who want to reserve to themselves the right to sue Tesco for footling accidents should pay for it. Fair, huh?

Other supermarkets seeing this will compete to calculate and spread the risks in ever-more finely calibrated ways. The consumer decides for himself/herself how much risk he/she wants to pay for. Consumers and supermarkets win, lawyers and bureaucrats lose. Hurrah.

This principle can be applied to safety regulations, if they are made transparent. If building A offers higher safety and higher prices than building B, people can choose which building to use.

A huge advantage of such ideas is that they compel people to lift their level of responsibility. Which is why they will be frantically opposed by the Teacher, Guardian and Enforcer categories (maybe alas Judges and Angels too) of Moral DNA owners who fear losing their self-proclaimed right to frame other people’s morality and choices.