Safety, going backwards

Charles Hugh Smith, writes about US attitudes to health and safety:

If you've bought a new vehicle recently, you may have noticed some "safety features" that strike many as Nanny State over-reach. You can't change radio stations, for example, if the vehicle is in reverse. ...  The narrowness of this obsession with safety comes into focus if we ask: how can a society so obsessed with safety have spawned an opioid addiction crisis that kills tens of thousands of people and ruins the lives of millions of Americans? How Safe Are We? Our Blindness to Systemic Dangers, Charles Hugh Smith, 10 May

An excellent question. The safety bureaucracy has goals that differ markedly from those of the health care sector, and both have goals that have little to do with maximising the well-being of citizens per dollar spent. And that should be the guiding criterion for both health and safety: from the policy point of view, they shouldn't be distinct.


Policy decisions about health policy, broadly interpreted to include safety, are heavily influenced by the public profile of a disease or its victims, rather than on what would best meet the needs of society. It’s also a question of diet, exercise, transport, and culture. Recent research shows, for instance, the beneficial effects on health of green spaces in our cities (see here (pdf) for instance). The way government is structured, with its discrete bureaucracies and funding bodies, makes it unlikely that such benefits will influence funding decisions.

We cannot expect a government nor any single organisation to identify the huge numbers of variables, with all their time lags and interactions, that influence the nation’s health - and to do so dynamically, taking into account our rapidly expanding scientific knowledge. We can, though, devise a system that rewards people who explore and implement the most cost-effective health solutions, even when circumstances and knowledge are changing continuously. I have tried to show how this can be done with my essay on Health Bonds, which would aim to distribute scarce government funds to where they would do most good, as measured by such indicators as Disability Adjusted Life Years. Under a Health Bond regime, investors in the bonds would have continuous incentives to maximise their returns on the bonds at all times: their objective, assuming we have carefully defined our targeted health goal, will be exactly congruent with those of society. Bondholders might well decide that, for instance, we should implement measures to switch off the ability to flip radio stations while a car is going backwards - but only if they think that to be one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching society's health goal. Indeed, Health Bonds would ensure that every decision, every activity, that bondholders contemplate or implement will be entirely subordinated to that objective. A stark contrast with the current system, under which officials have goals entirely distinct from, and sometimes in conflict with, the broader interests of society.