PART II

RISKY BUSINESS

In Peter Bernstein’s book Against the Gods, he notes that a few hundred years ago, risk as we understand it today did not exist. Death and disease certainly existed alongside myriad other miseries, but people regarded them as the inevitable consequences of divinely appointed destiny over which they had little control. Rather than risk, they thought of fate. People did not weigh the consequences of different career choices, technologies, and social policies, because for most people those options did not exist. Risk-taking was the province of gamblers with dice and cards—the first people to seriously study ways of measuring, quantifying, and managing risk, thereby pioneering many of the systems and assumptions that rule the world today.¹

The emergence of global capitalism, in tandem with science and technology, has created benefits that few people would be willing to forgo, but it has also transformed us into gamblers on an unprecedented scale. As we enter the twenty-first century, we face a mind-blowing array of technological possibilities: cloning, genetically engineered babies, replacement of food with “nutraceuticals,” surgically implanted cyborg enhancements of the human body. Technological change continues to accelerate, and with it come unintended consequences and risks that no one can predict in advance. The globalization of economics and politics means that events in remote locations affect us more rapidly and more intensely than ever before. In a world this complicated, it is hardly surprising that experts have become our guides, shaping our buying habits, health decisions, and public policy debates. But the experts who have created these technologies and the experts who encourage us to use them can be appallingly blind to the problems that they pose.

The downside to progress during the twentieth century included technological advances that enabled wars and government-sponsored atrocities to kill some 180 million people—a far larger total than for any other century in human history.² And that’s just the number of people whose deaths were deliberately engineered by government planners. The list of other problems, accidents, and mayhem linked to technological advance would include, for starters, train wrecks, toxic chemical releases, and emerging antibiotic-resistant diseases. Progress has given us air pollution, groundwater contamination, burgeoning landfills, extinctions of living species, deforestation, risks from transport of nuclear material, explosions, dietary exposure to chemicals, and nerve gas attacks by Saddam Hussein in the Middle East and terrorists in Japan. The worst disasters, such as global thermonuclear war, have not yet occurred but remain real possibilities.

Clearly, there are some gambles that we dare not take, yet as technological change accelerates, the economic interests that stand to benefit from those changes have become increasingly skillful at imposing their view of the respective risks and benefits upon society at large. The chapters in this section examine how industry experts think about the issue of risk and their strategies for discussing it with the public.