Life is risky. Everything you do has risks. Life without risks would be boring. If you want to reduce risks: stop driving cars, no riding bicycles, no playing high school sports, and no swimming at the beach. Once while whale watching on the Pacific Coast the boat captain pointed to Playa Ventanas, which he called the most dangerous beach in Costa Rica. I got caught in a rip current there once. It was scary but it is still my favorite beach to bodyboard.
Historically, risks were often from natural causes. Fires, extreme weather, infectious disease, food poisoning, etc. As Vox Media points out, risks have proliferated in the past century:
But as technology advanced, around 150 years ago, the risks also proliferated. New transportation, like railroads, held hazards for both passengers and workers. Mines, factories, and other industrial-era workplaces were hotbeds of danger. In order to assess the risks of industrial labor, states began collecting data about accidents and deaths.
Despite the increase in the number and variety or risks, people often overestimate the risk of various activities. More from Vox:
Planes are crashing on a near weekly basis. “Forever chemicals” and microplastics are in our water, embedded in our beauty products and clothing, and even burrowed in our brains. Your kitchen utensils might be poisoning you and perhaps your food is, too. Mysterious diseases — and not-so-mysterious diseases — seem to be forever threatening another global pandemic. Alarming news coverage of violent crime has people on edge, concerned for their safety.
With all these anxieties coursing through modern life, you might suspect the world is a fundamentally menacing place…
You would, however, be wrong to assume that danger is everywhere. Violent crime has been down, air travel is as safe as it’s ever been, mortality from infectious disease largely fell throughout the 20th and 21st centuries (even the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic was blunted by the swift development of effective vaccines). While much more can be done to ensure the safety and well-being of people, animals, and the earth, Americans live longer, safer, wealthier lives than centuries past.
Despite the veritable plethora of new risks, people have never been safer. People assume exceedingly rare events are more common than they are. Part of the reason is social media and the news media. We often hear about plane crashes, mass shootings, or other forms of violent crime. We assume these events are common, but out of a country of 330 million people, statistically speaking they are very rare causes of death.
Some of the risks people worry about are so small as to be trivial or effectively nonexistent. That beat up second-hand Teflon pan from Goodwill is probably not a good buy, nor is that degraded plastic cooking spatula. You can do better, but neither are likely to affect your health to a degree worth worrying over. Buying organic, grass-fed beef, organic vegetables and avoiding ultra processed foods and seed cooking oils is slightly healthier but it would require monitoring millions of people for decades to detect the difference. It pales in comparison to merely watching your diet and getting some exercise.
The freedom to do most activities of daily living involves an element of risk. Take driving a car. About 40,000 people die on America’s roads every year. The government has done a lot to mitigate the risk of driving in the past 50 years. The drinking age has increased while penalties for drunk driving have also risen. Cars are better designed to withstand crashes, seatbelts/airbags were mandated years ago, and roads built safer nowadays. Could we do more? Absolutely. Cars could be built much, much safer at a huge increase in cost. Speed limits could be reduced by half at a huge drop in productivity. Traffic laws could also be more rigidly enforced. In other words, the government could reduce auto fatalities further through a huge loss of freedom, income, and convenience. The reduced risk would not be worth the cost, however.
Life is about balancing risks with costs and benefits. About 30 years ago Tammy O. Tengs authored a report in the journal of Risk Analysis about the cost per life-year saved from 500 life-saving interventions. Some interventions are far cheaper than others. The cost of buying an additional year of life by slowing cars down and making them safer could run into the tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars. There are far cheaper ways to buy years of societal life.
When you are anxious about risks or wonder if you are doing enough to mitigate risk it’s a good idea to step back, take a deep breath, relax and educate yourself about how small life’s risks are. Go ahead and eat that grain-fed steak that’s past its expiration date, cooked in canola oil in that flaking Teflon pan, flipping it with a gnarly black plastic spatula. The health risk is exceedingly small, and there are better ways to reduce health risks.
Vox Media: Plane crashes, toxic spatulas, crime: How to think about risk in the world