Now in retirement and culling my files in the process of downsizing I came upon the following letter from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents dated 7 July 1981 shortly before Parliament was to vote on a seat belt law, and encouraging Parliament to vote for the law:

“TO ALL MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT

Dr. Adams has recently published a paper advancing the thesis that the wearing of seatbelts may actually increase road accidents by encouraging a sense of false security. … His paper presents road accident trends in several foreign countries to support his view. His paper requires detailed analysis. … For the time being his thesis remains unproven.”

25 years on RoSPA claims that the law has saved 60000 lives. Has it?

Yesterday when I showed Mayer Hillman the graphs in my last blog on this subject he complained that they displayed the statistics for all road user deaths and not the statistics for those affected by the seatbelt law, i.e. people in the front seats of cars.

My excuse was that at the time I produced the graphs, almost 20 years ago, I was focused on total numbers because of the evidence that the law coincided, in Britain and elsewhere, with increases in the numbers of pedestrians and cyclists killed. Also, at that time no one was claiming that the law had saved anything remotely approaching the recent claim by the Government, RoSPA and PACTS of 2400 lives saved per year.

But stung by Mayer’s insistence that the claimed saving of 2400 lives per year was more than the total number of car occupants killed, I went back to the numbers.

The graph below shows the data for the same period for car occupants only. I asked the computer to fit a line to the data up to and including 1982 (the year before the law came into effect, small red arrow) and it produced the downward sloping trend displayed. When asked to fit a line to the statistics after the seatbelt law the computer replied with an upward trend. When the claimed 2400 lives saved is displayed on the graph it shows that the law should have brought impressive numbers back from the dead. The claim would appear to be based on the work of creationist statisticians.

Simon Jenkins wrote an exceptionally powerful piece in the Guardian on 4 September entitled “The war on drugs is immoral idiocy”. His title conveys the essence. He went beyond proposals to decriminalize consumption, to advocate decriminalizing production as well – to be replaced by licensing, regulation and taxation. The Guardian appears to be suffering a failure of nerve on this sensitive subject. Although Jenkins’ article generated an enormous on-line response – 602 comments the last time I looked – it published no letters, including mine!! So being my own publisher I reproduce it below.

Simon Jenkins says “The mountain that must be climbed is licensing, regulating and taxing supply.” The Sherpas have made a start. In 2004 the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit published a report entitled “Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy for England”. It had a foreword by Tony Blair. He said:

“Millions of us enjoy drinking alcohol with few, if any, ill effects.”

But: “The Strategy Unit’s analysis last year showed that alcohol-related harm is costing around £20bn a year, and that some of the harms associated with alcohol are getting worse”.

So: “The aim has been to target alcohol-related harm and its causes without interfering with the pleasure enjoyed by the millions of people who drink responsibly.”

“Ultimately” he argued, “it is vital that individuals can make informed and responsible decisions about their own levels of alcohol consumption. Everyone needs to be able to balance their right to enjoy a drink with the potential risks to their own – and others’ – health and wellbeing”.

He concluded: “I strongly welcome this report and the Government has accepted all its conclusions. These will now be implemented as government policy and will, in time, bring benefits to us all in the form of a healthier and happier relationship with alcohol”.

A cut and paste job on the alcohol harm report, replacing “alcohol” with “drugs”, would go a long way to producing a Drug Harm Reduction Strategy. It contains no mention of prohibition.

Last night at 8pm BBC Radio 4 presented a programme entitled “Where did it all go right?” celebrating the success of Britain’s seat belt law. It will be available on the Radio 4 Listen Again facility for another 6 days. It can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mg2v6#synopsis  (or if you are too late for the listen again facility a fairly accurate witten summary can be found here).

I was the lone voice permitted to doubt the success of the law. Unable to present any evidence I felt, as I said at the end of the programme, like the last Japanese soldier in the jungle still fighting a war that had been lost 25 years earlier. Yet again the figure of 60000 lives saved by the law was trotted out, this time by someone from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.

This number, which amounts to 2400 lives a year over the 25 years since the law came into effect, appears on the website of PACTS (the Parliamentary Advisory Committee on Transport Safety). PACTS’ Executive Director Robert Gifford is co-author of an article “Seat belt laws: why we should keep them” (Significance, June 2008) which pointed out that in the first year of the law there were 432 fewer front seat car occupants killed, but 80 more rear seat occupants, 150 more pedestrians and 38 more cyclists killed - a net “saving” of 164 lives.

To celebrate my mastering the method of inserting graphics into blog posts I present below the statistics. They show that almost all the decrease in 1983 occurred during the drink-drive hours between 10 at night and 4 in the morning. 1983 was also the year in which evidential breath testing was introduced to the accompaniment of  unprecedented numbers of breath tests. Elsewhere I note that the decrease in driver fatalities in 1983 consisted almost entirely of drivers in un-built-up areas with alcohol in their blood.

And what would a saving of 2400 per year look like? This is what the Parliamentary Advisory Committee of Transport Safety is advising Parliament was the achievement of the law that it had the wisdom to pass 25 years ago.

The myth of the efficacy of seat belts laws has become deeply embedded. Their “success” is routinely invoked in all sorts of unrelated arguments: e.g. “Opposing wind farms is as ’socially unacceptable’ as not wearing a seatbelt” says the climate change minister.

Every so often it is given a boost by an outrageous claim that goes unchallenged and gets widely reported. Or if challenged, the challenge goes unacknowledged and unreported – see my post Myth Inflation on the DfT claim that the UK seat belt law has saved 60000 lives in the last 25 years..

The issue has come to my attention again at this time because I am preparing for a debate hosted by the College of Emergency Medicine on the resolution ”This house believes that helmets should be mandatory for all cycling children” and the proposer, Andrew Curran cites the success of seat belt laws (without citing any evidence) as an argument for the compulsory wearing of helmets.

But also because the myth has just been given an enormous boost by another widely reported whopper. “The man who saved a million lives: Nils Bohlin – inventor of the seatbelt.” This headline on 19 August in The Independent was repeated with minor variations in thousands of headlines and websites all round the world.

The number comes from a Volvo press release that says “Estimates put the figure at just over a million lives.” And it comes with a footnote: “Estimate by Volvo based on general and in-house statistics on accidents and belt use.”

On 17 August I sent them an email: “In your press release ‘A MILLION LIVES SAVED SINCE VOLVO INVENTED THE THREE-POINT SAFETY BELT’ at http://www.volvocars.com/uk/footer/about/NewsEvents/News/Pages/default.aspx?item=190 the source of the million estimate given in footnote 4 is ‘Estimate by Volvo based on general and in-house statistics on accidents and belt use’. I don’t like to use a number without knowing how it was produced. I would be grateful if you would provide the method by which it was produced and the statistics upon which it is based.”

On 2 September I received this reply:

“Unfortunately it’s very difficult to put an exact figure on the number of lives the three-point safety belt has saved since 1959 as there are no globally coordinated traffic safety statistics. The million number is an estimation based on numbers provided by a number of government departments around the world and Volvo’s in-house statistics on accidents and belt use.”

To which I replied:

“Thank you for your reply.

Some estimations are more accurate than others. If statistics are scarce (and in this case I agree that they are) the estimation is likely to be less accurate. But for it to be an “estimation”, as distinct from a wild-off-the-top-of-the-head guess, it must be based on a method and fed with some numbers.

Can you tell me the method used and the numbers with which it was fed? If not I must conclude that it is a self-interested wild-off-the-top-of-the-head guess. An indication of my reasons for doubting your “estimation” can be found on my website - http://john-adams.co.uk/2008/01/31/myth-inflation/.”

Correspondence was closed the same day:

“Thank you for your reply. I’m afraid I can’t offer any further information other than what’s detailed below (i.e. previous answer). I appreciate your concerns and I apologise that I can’t offer any further assistance.”

I suspect that opposing wind farms probably is as socially unacceptable as not wearing a seat belt, but that is a grammatically elliptical discussion for another day.

I have just returned from a fascinating conference at MIT on Security and Human Behaviour and am now preparing for the EU Green Week conference in Brussels.  This post explores an issue common to both conferences: paranoia.

The “security” of central interest to the MIT conference was that of people using the Internet. The titles of some of the sessions indicate the main security issues with which the conference was preoccupied: deception, privacy, fraud and terror. How might, the conference inquired, deception and invasion of the privacy of Internet users be used by “bad guys” (a term frequently deployed) to commit malicious acts – ranging from the spreading of viruses, misuse of medical records, and phishing to vote rigging, Facebook bullying, money laundering and acts of terrorism?

The final session was entitled “How do we fix the world?” It was I fear inconclusive. How might we good guys (obviously) frustrate or catch and punish the bad guys? Identification of the good guys was not as straightforward as one might have hoped. Law-abiding individuals with home computers do not pose a categorisation problem. But companies and institutions that collect personal data for legitimate purposes, but who are insufficiently aware of its sensitivity and insufficiently careful about protecting it fell into a gray area. And the Orwellian Big Brother state intent on imposing ID cards on its citizens and tracking all their phone calls, emails and Internet activity was, in the eyes of most (all?) at the conference not good at all.

Complaints about Big Brother were of two sorts. He was incompetent; he would lose sensitive data and/or fail to make effective use of it. Alternatively, were he to make it work, his surveillance agency would be indistinguishable from the Stasi. The problem is an ancient one: Juvenal asked “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – who will guard the guards themselves.

The session to which I have been invited to contribute in the Green Week Conference in Brussels is entitled “2050 Vision: Transport and spatial planning in a decarbonised world”. I have been invited to discuss “the social issues involved”. In my 20 minutes I will invite people to imagine a future in which science and technology have solved all problems of climate change and energy supply, freeing the world to indulge its appetite for ever-increasing mobility. Feeding this appetite is the objective of most current EU transport policies, as indicated by plans to increase airport capacity and subsidise the car industry to help it through the credit crunch.

What kind of world would such policies produce? I conclude that one of its most salient features will be paranoia. In the hypermobile world that current policies are creating people will spend most of their time in “communities of interest”. As levels of mobility – physical and electronic – increase, people have less time for social interaction with neighbours in old-fashioned geographical communities. The idea of communities of interest was popularized in 1963 by Melvin Webber in an essay entitled “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity”.
Webber was enthusing about the freedoms provided by the new California freeway system. They were enticing. Freed from burdensome relationships with geographical neighbours of all ages and with divers interests, people could spend their waking hours in the congenial company of people who thought like them. These freedoms have been hugely expanded by the global development of what Al Gore dubbed the “Information Superhighway”.

It is now apparent that the freedoms are being purchased at a cost. In geographical communities in which people know their neighbours and recognize people they pass in the street, people trust each other, or know why they don’t. In a world consisting of aspatial communities of interest people know each other much less well. They may know about others’ interests, but they don’t know other members of their “community” as complete people. They do not know whom to trust. Much of the MIT conference was devoted to the problem of negotiating transactions under conditions of low trust.

Low trust creates a particular problem for governments. Governments rule over geographically demarcated parts of the world. Few communities of interest pledge allegiance to geographically defined areas. There is now a globe-spanning community of interest focused on a man who may, or may not, live in a cave in Waziristan. Fear of this man and the atrocities that might be committed by members of his community of interest now justify the inconveniencing of millions of air travelers and the intrusive surveillance of billions of people world-wide. The default assumption by governments is that everyone is a potential threat and should, therefore, be kept under surveillance. Despite the fact that no air passenger, anywhere, ever has been killed by a shoe bomb we are all required to take off our shoes when passing through airport security.

The hope that electronic mobility would substitute for physical mobility has been disappointed. Despite enormous increases in the time spent online we are travelling more than ever. The amount of time we spend in communities of interest, assuming we are not spending less time sleeping, must be time not spent in geographical communites. A Stanford Study has revealed a strong negative correlation between time spent on line and time spent interacting with family and friends.

As geographical communities are displaced by communities of interest we are increasingly likely to find ourselves living in propinquity (to use Webber’s word) to members of communities whose cultures we find incomprehensible and sometimes threatening. One of the presentations at the MIT conference was by John Mueller who briefly summarized the message of his excellent book Overblown. Overblown is his one-word label for the paranoid response of the US Department of Homeland Security to the threat posed by the man in the cave. His description of the paranoia that has transformed “the home of the brave” into a nation sufficiently spooked to acquiesce in the sacrifice of cherished freedoms was vivid and convincing. But he held out little hope of his evidence and arguments prevailing.  The world’s most mobile nation – physically and electronically – seems to have lost its nerve.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  In our paranoid world of communities of interest it appears that the millions off air travellers obediently removing their shoes are less interested in guarding the guards than in the protection they purport to provide.

Letter NOT published in the Guardian. Submitted 30 April.

My two favorite commentators on the subject of risk have fallen out. Simon Jenkins (29 April) predicts that swine flu will end up with bird flu and Sars in the category of over-hyped scare that never happened. Ben Goldacre (30 April) says that if Simon turns out to be right he wont have been right, just lucky - a swine flu pandemic is a real risk.

 They are discussing what risk geeks call a low-frequency high-impact event. Chances are that Simon will be proved right/lucky. If you bet against every hypothetical low-frequency high impact event that might happen you will be right/lucky most of the time. Many are hypothesized, few materialize.

 The hypotheses that bird flu or Sars could have been, or swine flu might be, as catastrophic as the 1918 flu epidemic were not, and are not, implausible.  But they can be assigned low statistical probabilities. What should governments do when confronted with such threats? How much should they spend in the form of money, time and economic disruption to defend against them? Building defenses against low probability threats incurs opportunity costs; chances are the money could be spent elsewhere more effectively.

 Consider a much lower frequency much higher impact event – a catastrophic collision between earth and an asteroid. It has happened and will do again. In the world’s present state we can but afford to shrug fatalistically. Straining every economic, scientific and technological sinew to defend against it would steal resources from, and thereby inhibit, a wide range of activities that might ultimately build an economy in which asteroid defense would be affordable.

On swine flu I’m betting with Simon, but will continue to cheer Ben on every Saturday.

Risk Now available as Risco in Portuguese. See Deus é Brasileiro? for new preface - in English.

The above title advertises a Cambridge Science Festival event, (9 March 2009) in which I have been invited to participate.  My answer to the question in the title, will be spelt out in my first PowerPoint slide:

“No: because paranoia cannot be cured by CCTV, or DNA databases, or ID cards, or CRB checks, or number plate recognition, or GPS tracking, or email archiving, or data mining.”

Further, I intend to argue that the combined force of all of these measures feeds the threats that they purport to defend against. For rest of essay click here.

Below is a letter to the Guardian, published today (11 February 2009) in reduced form.

Jacqui Smith is keen that the Government’s classification of drugs should send clear messages to would-be users. One message conveyed by her attack on David Nutt (Drugs adviser says sorry over ecstasy article, 10 February) is that she does not care about the scientific evidence of harm, or does not understand it.

She brushes aside his comparison that shows that riding a horse is many times more dangerous than using ecstasy on the ground that the first is legal and the second illegal. A second message is, therefore, that ecstasy should be made legal, or horse riding illegal. Or is the intended message that the Government cares nothing for consistency.

More on drugs here and here