Risk and Reason

Safety, Law, and the Environment

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by Cass R. Sunstein

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published March 2004, 360 pages, paper

ISBN 0521016258

New in paper (S04)

What should be done about airplane safety and terrorism, global warming, polluted water, nuclear power, and genetically engineered food? All over the globe, risks to safety, health, and the environment are a subject of intense interest. Unfortunately, too much of the time we fear the wrong things. Sometimes we make the situation even worse. Rather than investigating the facts, we respond to temporary fears. The result is a situation of hysteria and neglect - and unnecessary illness and death. Risk and Reason explains the sources of these problems and explores what can be done about them. It shows how individual thinking and social interactions lead us in foolish directions. Offering sound proposals for social reform, it explains how a more sensible system of risk regulation, embodied in the idea of a 'cost-benefit state', could save many thousands of lives and many billions of dollars too - and protect the environment in the process. 17 line diagrams 41 tables

"Regulatory policy debates often fail to serve a constructive role. Advocates of risk and environmental regulation maintain that only with zero risk will we be safe. Economic critics seek to impose cost-benefit tests on these policies that many believe ignore the distinctive character of safety and the environment. In Risk and Reason, Cass Sunstein eliminates the impasse in the regulatory policy debate with a balanced policy perspective."--W. Kip Viscusi, Havard Law School

"A masterly and multifaceted analysis of government policy towards the protection of the population from risks. The central theme is analyzed in an extraordinary variety of viewpoints. The author has drawn, with deep knowledge and originality, on recent developments in cognitive psychology and in legal doctrine to complement rationalistic and economic viewpoints." --Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University

 Contents

1. Beyond 1970s environmentalism
2. Thinking about risks
3. Are the experts wrong?
4. This month's risk (with Timur Kuran)
5. Reducing risks rationally
6. Health-health tradeoffs
7. The arithmetic of arsenic
8. Of courts and law: cost-benefit default principles
9. Cleaning the air
10. Tools.