Good point: we tend to act as if the worst-case scenario were a given, without regard for the relatively foreseeable negative consequences to safety measures.
This is more of a tradeoff of time and money than lives saved, but see our continued insistence that nobody can get on an airplane without taking their shoes off. It’s a policy that has almost certainly done no good and never stood a serious chance of doing any good. Here a political scientist explains why it’s very hard to walk back stupid policies like that even when virtually everyone agrees they should be walked back: in most cases, someone’s got to take the initiative to walk it back, and in the event of a very-unlikely disaster, voters will disproportionately blame the walker-back, but will not blame him/her for the inconvenience they experience while the policy remains in place. There’s no incentive to do the obviously intelligent thing.
All this said, in order to fully argue for the Rita example, you’d have to show that the people who ordered the evacuation were wrong to do so. Perhaps many more than 90 lives would have been lost had the 2.5 million evacuees remained in place. Perhaps they would not have, but the best available damage forecasting indicated that they probably would be. As the linked report says, the hurricane narrowly missed major population centers. If the best available forecasting indicated that there was a 10% chance that it would strike those population centers, and if it did there was a 90% chance that 2000 people would die, whereas if the evacuation were ordered there was a 90% chance that 100 people would die in the process of evacuating, then the evacuation was the right call. (Numbers pulled out of my ass, obviously, but just illustrating that even in the case of a seemingly “anti-safety” scenario like Hurricane Rita, it’s hard to figure out, even in retrospect, what course of action is best.)
Good point: we tend to act as if the worst-case scenario were a given, without regard for the relatively foreseeable negative consequences to safety measures.
This is more of a tradeoff of time and money than lives saved, but see our continued insistence that nobody can get on an airplane without taking their shoes off. It’s a policy that has almost certainly done no good and never stood a serious chance of doing any good. Here a political scientist explains why it’s very hard to walk back stupid policies like that even when virtually everyone agrees they should be walked back: in most cases, someone’s got to take the initiative to walk it back, and in the event of a very-unlikely disaster, voters will disproportionately blame the walker-back, but will not blame him/her for the inconvenience they experience while the policy remains in place. There’s no incentive to do the obviously intelligent thing.
All this said, in order to fully argue for the Rita example, you’d have to show that the people who ordered the evacuation were wrong to do so. Perhaps many more than 90 lives would have been lost had the 2.5 million evacuees remained in place. Perhaps they would not have, but the best available damage forecasting indicated that they probably would be. As the linked report says, the hurricane narrowly missed major population centers. If the best available forecasting indicated that there was a 10% chance that it would strike those population centers, and if it did there was a 90% chance that 2000 people would die, whereas if the evacuation were ordered there was a 90% chance that 100 people would die in the process of evacuating, then the evacuation was the right call. (Numbers pulled out of my ass, obviously, but just illustrating that even in the case of a seemingly “anti-safety” scenario like Hurricane Rita, it’s hard to figure out, even in retrospect, what course of action is best.)