Published in The Guardian
Thursday June 12, 2008

Ian Stewart asserts that his university’s mathematics students “earn more money, on average, than those studying any other degree subject” and that “their ability to handle technical ideas is highly prized, and rewarded” (Letters, June 7). His assumption, shared by most other contributors to the current debate about maths teaching, is that this reward differential can be projected on to the nation as a whole, with the conclusion that if we were to have more well-paid mathematicians we would all be much richer.

We should distinguish between two rewards - to the mathematicians, and to the rest of us. The mathematically trained “rocket scientists” in the City and Wall Street have been engaged in a financial arms race. They have been extravagantly rewarded for devising the clever financial “instruments” that are so clever that no one, themselves included, understands them.

Almost 20 years ago, in Does God Play Dice? - The Mathematics of Chaos, Ian Stewart observed: “because we are part of the universe, our effort to predict it may interfere with what it was going to do. This kind of problem gets very hairy and I don’t want to pursue what may well be an infinite regress: I don’t know how a computer would function if its constituent atoms were affected by the results of its own computations.”

The bubble of bad debt now distributed globally presents precisely the problem that Stewart does not wish to pursue. The rocket scientists are still absurdly well rewarded for playing war games with other rocket scientists - with other people’s money. But they are the constituent atoms in Stewart’s infinite regress. They have all become day traders trying to second-guess each other over the next move up or down of whatever it is they are betting on.

The current bubble may prove to be the biggest ever. But maths courses, as Simon Jenkins has observed, don’t do history.

For more on the subject of numbers and rocket science see - Risk Management: it’s not rocket science - it’s more complicated

The tobacco industry and me
This posting has been paid for by the tobacco industry. It is an article commissioned by Risk of Freedom Briefing, a publication edited by the philosopher Roger Scruton and sponsored by JT International (Japan Tobacco). Sadly, before it could be published, JT International withdrew their sponsorship and the publication ceased business. So it is published here for the first time. But although it wasn’t published I was paid for the article so I confess to having taken the industry’s shilling – or in this case £100.
For article click here.

Martin Parkinson raises an interesting question (comment on previous post): what should be the reaction to an accident that, a priori, was an extremely low probability event? He suggests that “any attempt to reverse the counterproductive aspects of ‘health and safety culture’ is doomed to failure”. After an accident he argues that most people will say, “well that tragic accident which just occurred could have been easily avoided – it would be unthinkable not to make the obvious small change which would avoid a repetition”. Further, he adds, “the accident might have been freakish and unforeseen, but if there is a seemingly easy and cheap “fix”, then no responsibly-minded person would fail to make that fix …there is no logical point at which you can say your environment has “just the right amount of apparent danger”.

This is an issue that I probed in a recent essay “Dangerous trees?”. See the section entitled “Fault trees, event trees and trees”.

Britain’s Health and Safety Executive declares risks of death of less than 1:1,000,000 to be “acceptable” - defined as “generally regarded as insignificant and adequately controlled”. But how should such risks be calculated? If one divides the number of people killed by trees in Britain every year by the population, the risk works out at about 1:10,000,000. Acceptable? Only until someone is killed.

After the event it is usually possible to identify the cause and the person(s) responsible. A risk worth taking becomes culpable negligence. Hindsight transforms an “acceptable” risk with a probability of 1:10,000,000 into one with a probability of 1:1.

The fear of becoming the legally-liable victim of such a transformation, assisted by no-win-no-fee lawyers, is perhaps the main driver of the excessive risk aversion that bans hanging flower baskets and forbids conkers without goggles. For most institutional risk managers, outside hedge funds, there are no rewards for taking risks, only costs for failure. For them, one accident is one too many. No set of circumstances for which they might be held responsible can be too safe.

Escape from the suffocating safety culture that such reasoning produces can be sought in a “blame-free” culture. After a low-probability “freakish” accident, emphasis should be placed not on establishing guilt and punishment, but on lessons to be learned. Judges, juries and the Health and Safety Executive have important roles to play. Reconstructed foresight, not 20/20 hindsight, should be the standard against which culpability for freakish accidents should be judged.

Thanks Martin for your highly pertinent comments.

Presentation for PRIAN Public Realm Course, Bedford, 28 April 2008.

Traditional highway engineering assumes that safety requires the spatial segregation of pedestrians, cyclists and motorized vehicles or, where this is not possible, rigorously enforced rules, signs and signals dictating temporal segregation. Road users, according to the established paradigm, are irresponsible, stupid, selfish automatons whose safety can only be assured by physical barriers to conflict, supplemented by legal sanctions for disobeying the rules.      

“Shared space” stands many of the traditional assumptions on their heads. It assumes a very different road user - one who is responsible, alert and responsive to evidence of safety or danger.  It proposes tearing down physical barriers such as pedestrian guard rails and segregation infrastructure as pedestrian bridges, and filling in pedestrian tunnels. It also proposes removing stop signs and traffic lights and other signage and road markings demanding compliance at the cost of criminal or financial sanctions. It deliberately creates uncertainty as to who has the right of way on the assumption that road users will work it out for themselves in a civilized fashion.

The idea is attracting growing numbers of adherents – if one types “shared space” into Google one is rewarded with 100s of 1000s of hits. It has its own website -  http://www.shared-space.org/ - and a useful Wikipedia entry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space. Two English websites that have been prominent in the promotion of the idea are:  http://www.hamilton-baillie.co.uk/ and http://www.publicrealm.info/

  In the streets where it has been implemented it has, thus far, improved appearance, enhanced conviviality and not increased accidents – and frequently reduced them. 

But clearly it is not appropriate everywhere. A counter example frequently cited by sceptics and opponents are the high road traffic accident rates in third world countries who enjoy “natural” shared space – i.e. countries which have yet to get round to installing conventional segregation and signage.

The next four slides present examples of places and circumstances in which the idea works well. 

For the PowerPoint Notes version of full presentation click here

I have yet to master hyperlinks. Those wishing to view the video clip of shared space on the Archway Road (slide 6) please copy and paste this link -  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=shared+space+archway&search_type=

And those wishing to view the clip of shared space somewhere in India (slide eight) please copy and paste this link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjrEQaG5jPM

“Moral hazard” is a term used in the insurance industry to refer to the way in which behaviour alters when people acquire insurance. People with house contents insurance are less careful about locking up. Such behaviour in the eyes of insurers is “immoral”. The term stigmatizes human nature. We all adjust our behaviour in response to our perception of hazard – we all slow down when we come to a sharp bend in the road.

The term is now enjoying unprecedented popular exposure in discussions of the Bank of England’s rescue of banks and building societies. Might rescuing them from the consequences of foolish decisions encourage more foolishness? A good question but not sufficiently sharply focussed.

It is not the banks, and all their clerks, depositors and shareholders, who have been foolish. It is particular individuals, whose culpability is strongly correlated with the size of their salaries and bonuses during the boom years. Their behaviour merits the label immoral because they have been reaping their enormous, risk-free rewards in a system rigged in their favour.

The economy has come to a sharp bend in the road. Those responsible are still in their hummers, with bull bars, air bags and seat belts. Why should they care? Why should they behave differently in the future? Unless the rescue operation confronts the incentives to immorality built into the current system, they are unlikely to slow down.

Published in abbreviated form in The Guardian 24 April 2008

Dear Sir

Simon Jenkins (4 April 2008) exposes the Achilles heel of all the proposed eco-towns: transport. But he is a trifle hard on the motives of the original proponents of the garden cities and new towns. Relieving the squalid, densely packed, inner city slums by providing houses in new settlements, with gardens, in which people would live within walking or cycling distance of jobs, shops, schools, doctors and friends was a noble vision. All these visionaries, including the eponymous author of the Abercrombie Plan, failed to anticipate the enormous increase in car ownership. The presumed local-scale functioning of these new settlements was destroyed by the car. Their inhabitants bought them, got into them, and roamed widely in pursuit of employment and supermarket bargains. They became car dependent.

The naiveté of the early visionaries is no longer excusable. The process has been going on for too long. John Prescott’s vow to get people out of their cars and on to public transport has been overwhelmed by growing numbers of cars. Since Labour came to power the country’s motor vehicle population has increased by almost 8 million. To provide just one parking space for each of these extra vehicles would require a car park equivalent to a new motorway stretching from London to Edinburgh - 90 lanes wide.

The nation’’s vehicle population cannot be accommodated within a landuse pattern in which walking, cycling and buses are viable modes of transport for most of the human population. The Government’’s eco-town aspirations will be defeated by the Government’s transport policies.

An abbreviated version of this letter was published in the Guardian on 7 April 2008.

God, I suspect, finds Photoshoppers especially amusing. Grudging thanks to Peter Holtham for spoiling my tutorial. See http://www.cargolaw.com/2005nightmare_catch-day.html for the answers to the questions posed at the end of my last post.

The words “risk” and “management” sit uncomfortably alongside each other. Many people believe that it is possible to distinguish “real”, “actual” or “objective” risk from “perceived” risk. But all risk is perceived. It is a word that refers to the future, a future that exists only in our imaginations.
Those who call themselves risk managers purport to be able to manage the future. They are oblivious to Woody Allen’s hubris puncturing question “How do you make God laugh?” Answer “Tell him your plans.” Read full essay (PDF).

Can anyone tell me where this event happened, and with what consequences?

I have just found an anonymous, one sentence comment on my blog. It reads: “Your campaign against seat belt wearing has already borne fruit: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4411639a6479.html .”

The link takes you to an interesting story from New Zealand with the headline “Seatbelt subterfuge kills driver”. The driver who was killed, according to the story, was opposed to the law requiring him to wear a seat belt. He had been fined 32 times for not wearing one. At the time of his fatal accident

he was wearing something over his shoulder to create the illusion of a seat belt to fool passing police. The verdict of the coroner was less conclusive than that asserted in the headline: “he may well have survived had he worn one.”

Indeed he might have. A seat belt greatly increases a car occupant’s chances of surviving a crash. This is how I put it in “Risk and Freedom: the record of road safety legislation ” (p50) 23 years ago: “The evidence that the use of a seat belt greatly improves a car occupant’s chances of surviving a crash appears to be overwhelming. That a person traveling at speed inside a hard metal shell will stand a better chance of surviving a crash if he is restrained from rattling about inside the shell is both intuitively obvious and supported by an impressive body of empirical evidence.”

I quote myself from 23 years ago because for the whole of the intervening period I have been accused, by people like our anonymous commentator, of having blood on my hands for questioning the efficacy of seat belt laws. The “fruit” of my “campaign” according to my accusers is fatally toxic: to raise doubts about the life-saving efficacy of seat belt laws is to encourage people not to wear seat belts – leaving me responsible for the deaths of vehicle occupants who die unbelted.

Mr Segedin, the fatally injured driver was, according to the report, driving a car full of rust with an expired warrant, and an autopsy blood test showed he had taken methamphetamine and cannabis – all factors that an insurance company would consider identifiers of a high-risk driver. Yet the story, as reported, identifies the non-wearing of a seat belt as the sole cause of death.

Because seat belts are undeniably effective at reducing death and injury in crashes there is, or was, a mystery. Why in country after country that mandated seat belts was it impossible to see the promised reduction in road accident fatalities? The most plausible explanation is “risk compensation”. It appears that measures that protect drivers from the consequences of bad driving encourage bad driving. The principal effect of seat belt legislation has been a shift in the burden of risk from those already best protected in cars, to the most vulnerable, pedestrians and cyclists, outside cars.

This question is posed by Philip Stott in two recent postings on his blog entitled “Pascal’s Wager And ‘Global Warming’” and “An Obstinate Rationality“ .Stott’s blog is worth adding to your “favourites” and visiting frequently. He used to give an annual lecture to my students and invariably was awarded top marks in the student assessments of the lectures to which they were subjected.

I find him a convincing sceptic. An example from “An Obstinate Rationality”:
“Whenever I hear politicians and activists talking about “stopping climate change”, or “saving the planet”; when I see the rich buying indulgences in the form of carbon credits, or carbon offsets; when I hear politicians talking about “zero-carbon houses”, when no such thing exists; when I hear scientists declaring that we can manage the most complex, coupled, non-linear, semi-chaotic system known to humans by fiddling at the margins with one factor - and to a degree Celsius; when I see the blatant hypocrisy of newspapers like The Independent and The Guardian, which lecture us all, while selling foreign holidays, page after page; when I hear academics planning to fly to another world conference on climate change; when I watch one more hyped-up report, with shelving ice and doleful polar bears, on the tele; when I see yet another celebrity flying in to yet another world gig to tell us how to live the ‘Green’ life; when I hear claims that wind turbines will save the world; ….. an obstinate rationality prevents me from having anything to do with the carbon claptrap of the Global Warming Religion and the trivial pieties of our shallow Age.”