The End of Doom

by Ronald Bailey

  The Seen and the Unseen

  Promoters of the precautionary principle argue that its great advantage is that implementing it will help avoid deleterious unintended consequences of new technologies. Unfortunately, supporters are most often focusing on the seen while ignoring the unseen. In his brilliant essay “What Is Seen and What Is Unseen,” nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat pointed out that the favorable “seen” effects of any policy often produce many disastrous “unseen” later consequences. Bastiat urges us “not to judge things solely by what is seen, but rather by what is not seen.” Banning nuclear power plants reduces the allegedly seen risk of exposure to radiation while boosting the unseen risks associated with man-made global warming. Prohibiting a pesticide aims to diminish the seen risk of cancer, but elevates the unseen risk of malaria. Demanding more drug trials seeks to prevent the seen risks of toxic side effects, but increases the unseen risks of disability and death stemming from delays in getting effective drugs to patients. Mandating the production of biofuels attempts to address the seen risks of dependence on foreign oil, but heightens the unseen risks of starvation.

  Jonathan Adler sensibly asks, “Why is it safer or more ‘precautionary’ to focus on the potential harms of new activities or technologies without reference to the activities or technologies they might displace?” He adds, “There is no a priori reason to assume that newer technologies or less-known risks are more dangerous than older technologies or familiar threats. In many cases, the exact opposite will be true. A new, targeted pesticide may pose fewer health and environmental risks than a pesticide developed ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Shifting the burden of proof, as the Wingspread Statement calls for, is not a ‘precautionary’ policy so much as a reactionary one.”

  As we’ve seen, the precautionary principle privileges the status quo by shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of new activities and technologies. But that’s not all. The rhetoric of the precautionary principle enables its promoters to drape themselves in the mantle of the public interest. The precautionary principle “places the speaker on the side of the citizen—I am acting for your health—and portrays the opponents of the contemplated ban or regulation as indifferent or hostile to the public’s health,” explained Aaron Wildavsky. “The rhetoric works in part because it assumes what actually should be proved, namely that the health effects of the regulation will be superior to the alternative. This comparison is made possible in the only possible way—by assuming that there are no health detriments from the proposed regulation.” In other words, proponents of the precautionary principle are trying to get away with claiming that there are no trade-offs; they assert that their policy of suppressing new technologies guarantees benefits without incurring any risks. But as the pesticide, nuclear power, drug approval, and biofuels examples clearly show, that is simply not true. It is impossible to abate just one risk—there are risks on all sides of any technological process, including the risks of banning it.

  Precautionists also ignore another vital fact about progress: All technologies serve as bridges to other technologies, to ever better and safer alternatives. For example, without the production of fossil fuels, humanity would not be in the position to make the costly, knowledge-intensive transition to the solar/hydrogen future that many environmentalists wish to subsidize into existence. One technology leads to another. As dirty as burning fossil fuels may be, they aren’t a tenth as dirty as burning wood. And if the world had not switched to fossil fuels, it might well have been the case that all the world’s forests would have been cut down by now.

  Precaution and Perfect Foresight

  Embedded in the precautionary principle is the notion that humans can somehow anticipate all of the ramifications of a technology in advance and can tell whether on balance it will be a net benefit or a net cost to humanity and the environment. That’s complete nonsense. Human beings are terrible at foresight. To cite a single example, when the optical laser was invented in 1960, it was dismissed as “an invention looking for a job.” No one could imagine what possible use this interesting phenomenon might be. Of course, now the optical laser is integral to the operation of hundreds of everyday products. It runs our printers, transmits our data on optical telephone networks, performs laser surgery to correct myopia, checks us out at the store, plays our CDs, opens clogged arteries, helps level our crop fields, and so forth. It’s ubiquitous. Yet no one anticipated—no one could have anticipated—how incredibly useful lasers would turn out to be, not even the wisest tribunal of environmentalist seers. Permissionless innovation produces progress.

  Consider another case of overwrought precaution. In the 1970s, there were extensive efforts to ban genetic engineering research on precautionary grounds (see the next chapter). As late as 1989, in response to Green Party pressure, German regulators forbade the chemical manufacturer Hoechst to open its then-state-of-the-art biotechnology facility outside Frankfurt to produce pure human insulin using gene-spliced bacteria. The process poses no significant threats and biotech insulin is safer for diabetics to use than was the standard pig and cow insulin sourced from slaughterhouses. The anti-biotech precautionary prohibition doubtlessly harmed German diabetics who would have benefited from nonanimal insulin.

  Electricity, automobiles, antibiotics, oil production, computers, plastics, vaccinations, chlorination, mining, pesticides, paper manufacture, and nearly everything that constitutes the vast enterprise of modern technology all have risks. On the other hand, it should be perfectly obvious that allowing inventors and entrepreneurs to take those risks has enormously lessened others. How do we know? People in modern societies are enjoying much longer and healthier lives than did our ancestors, with greatly reduced risks of disease, disability, and early death.

  “A generic focus on new products is problematic because they often present lower risks than the older products they are intended to replace and failing to adopt new products can increase risks,” observes a 2013 report from the nonprofit Council for Agricultural Science and Technology. “Regardless of whether the subject is automobiles, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, factories, or a myriad of other products, new technologies are generally safer than the older versions. By imposing a barrier to the introduction of newer technologies, the Precautionary Principle favors the status quo, which could often mean higher risks.”

  The precautionary principle is profoundly conservative, privileging the old over the new, the past over the future. It amounts to an argument from ignorance, claiming that the truth of a premise is based on the fact that it has not been proven false, or that a premise is false because it has not been proven true. In this case, the wielders of the precautionary principle can simply assert that any new technology they dislike could be dangerous merely because their claim has not been proven false. Conversely, precautionists can contend that claims for the safety of a new technology are false on the grounds that it has not been proven (sufficiently) true.

  Prior to the modern era, most societies were dominated by elites that sought to restrict the range of activities and technologies available to their subjects. For example, on precautionary grounds the samurai during the Tokugawa period in Japan forbade their subjects firearms; the Turkish caliph outlawed printing presses throughout the Middle East and North Africa until 1729; and the Chinese emperor burned all oceangoing vessels in 1525 and restricted ships to having just two masts for sails. Now modern environmentalist elites would similarly restrict access to technologies that they find too dangerous and socially disruptive.

  The precautionary principle empowers a self-selected elite of the timorous to obstruct progress for the majority. In a sense, the precautionary principle is a return to the era when clerics and nobles (environmentalist ideologues and bureaucrats today) had the power to halt innovations on the grounds that they were bad for the common folk. The precautionary principle is the opposite of the scientific process of trial and error that is the modern engine of knowledge and prosperity. The precautio
nary principle impossibly demands trials without errors, successes without failures.

  Trial Without Error

  “The direct implication of trial without error is obvious: If you can do nothing without knowing first how it will turn out, you cannot do anything at all,” explained Aaron Wildavsky in his 1988 book Searching for Safety. “An indirect implication of trial without error is that if trying new things is made more costly, there will be fewer departures from past practice; this very lack of change may itself be dangerous in forgoing chances to reduce existing hazards.”

  Wildavsky added, “Existing hazards will continue to cause harm if we fail to reduce them by taking advantage of the opportunity to benefit from repeated trials.” On the other hand, he suggested, “Allowing, indeed, encouraging, trial and error should lead to many more winners, because of (a) increased wealth, (b) increased knowledge, and (c) increased coping mechanisms, i.e., increased resilience in general.” Wildavsky contends that pursuing a strategy of resilience is a far superior way to mitigate any deleterious side effects of new technologies. Greater knowledge, experience, and wealth gained from technological progress supplies societies and individuals with more options for handling whatever problems might arise, either natural or man-made.

  Progress and Safety Happen Only Through Trial and Error

  Fortunately, two centuries ago, some societies managed to escape the dead hand of elite rule and embark upon the trial-and-error process embodied in science, the market, and democratic politics. The result of the risks taken by social, economic, political, and scientific innovators is modern prosperity. “The true key to the timing of the Industrial Revolution has to be sought in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century. The key to the Industrial Revolution was technology, technology is knowledge,” explains Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr in his 2002 book The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Technology is the productive engine that has enabled some happy portion of humanity to escape from our natural state of abject poverty.

  Correspondingly, Timothy Ferris, author of The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature, points out: “Liberalism and science are methods, not ideologies.” Both embody the freedom to explore and experiment, enabling people to more systematically use trial and error to seek truths about the physical and social worlds. Both science and liberalism advance in their goal of better understanding their subject matter by falsifying asserted claims. As Nobel Prize economics laureate Friedrich Hayek argued, “Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.” It is through a continual process of trial and error and success and failure that science and liberalism ultimately yield better ways of doing things.

  The modern combination of liberal trial-and-error institutions—limited democracy, free markets, and liberal science—emerged in Western Europe and North America and have been spreading around the globe. Wherever the institutions of liberalism have been embraced, prosperity has followed in their wake. Given all the benefits that modern scientific and technological enterprise has bestowed upon humanity, why would some people be against it? “Technological progress inevitably involves losers, and these losers … tend to be concentrated and usually find it easy to organize,” notes Mokyr. “Sooner or later in any society the progress of technology will grind to a halt because the forces that used to support innovation become vested interests,” he explains. “In a purely dialectical fashion, technological progress creates the very forces that eventually destroy it.”

  As Jonathan Adler notes, “Economic interests also have reason to adopt precautionary appeals insofar as such appeals enable these groups to erect barriers to competing technologies or firms, close markets, or otherwise use environmental regulations as a tool for rent-seeking.” Candlemakers, after all, cannot be expected to hail the invention of the electric lightbulb, nor hostlers the advent of automobiles, nor canal-boat owners the building of railways, nor coal miners the development of nuclear power. Applying the precautionary approach, candlemakers will urge rejection of the competing technology, citing the dangers of electric shock; hostlers, of car crashes; canal-boat owners, of train engine smoke; and miners, of the risks of radiation. European governments eager to protect their farmers from competition have already cited the precautionary principle as justification for blocking the imports of meat from hormone-treated cows and genetically enhanced grains from the United States.

  The great fear of many proponents of the precautionary principle is that if technological decisions are left to people voluntarily acting in markets, those who favor a new technology can vote yes by buying it or switching to it. They can purchase products using new synthetic materials, or foods grown using biotechnology, or energy produced by thorium reactors. Of course, those who oppose a new technology can refuse to buy or use it and its products; but, as Mokyr notes, they “have no control over what others do even if they feel it might affect them. In markets it is difficult to express a no vote.”

  Thus it is no surprise that the foes of various new technologies embrace the precautionary principle and urge that decisions about them be moved from the voluntary realm of markets to the domain of political mandates. Of course, they benignly characterize this move as being more “democratic.” In reality, opponents of new technologies believe that they will have more luck in stopping technologies they abhor by lobbying their local congressperson or member of parliament to vote to prohibit their development.

  “Activists, bureaucrats, and lawyers are hampering promising research and making it more costly,” writes Mokyr. “But the achievements made possible by new useful knowledge in terms of economic well-being and human capabilities have been unlike anything experienced before by the human race. The question remains, can this advance be sustained?” That is indeed the question for the twenty-first century.

  Friedrich Hayek explained that “it is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.” This includes those who think that they can anticipate and prevent harms stemming from the process of technological innovation.

  As the history of the last two centuries has shown, Hayek was surely right when he concluded: “Nowhere is freedom more important than where our ignorance is greatest—at the boundaries of knowledge, in other words, where nobody can predict what lies a step ahead.… The ultimate aim of freedom is the enlargement of those capacities in which man surpasses his ancestors and to which each generation must endeavor to add its share—its share in the growth of knowledge and the gradual advance of moral and aesthetic beliefs, where no superior must be allowed to enforce one set of views of what is right or good and where only further experience can decide what should prevail. It is wherever man reaches beyond his present self, where the new emerges and assessment lies in the future, that liberty ultimately shows its value.”

  Unfortunately, the precautionary principle sounds sensible to many people, especially those who live in societies already replete with technology. These people have their centrally heated house in the woods; they already enjoy the freedom from want, disease, and ignorance that technology can provide. They may think they can afford the luxury of ultimate precaution. But there are billions of people who still yearn to have their lives transformed. For them, the precautionary principle is a warrant for continued poverty, not safety.

  Should we look before we leap? Sure we should. But every utterance of proverbial wisdom has its counterpart, reflecting both the complexity and the variety of life’s situations and the foolishness involved in applying a short list of hard rules to them. Given the manifold challenges of poverty and environmental renewal that technological progress can help us address in this century, the wiser maxim to heed is “He who hesitates is lost.”

  4

/>   What Cancer Epidemic?

  IN MY THIRTIES, I GREATLY REDUCED MY RISK of cancer when I visited a hypnotist in New York City. I started smoking cigarettes in college and quickly became a three- to four-pack-a-day smoker. Even when faced with the pain and sorrow of numerous lung cancer patients while working for a while as a hospital attendant in a radiation oncology department, I didn’t quit. But eventually the data on just how dangerous tobacco smoking is sank in, so I tried stopping cold turkey, chewing packs of nicotine gum, and so forth. Nothing worked.

  Thus early one morning in the mid-1980s, I found myself standing in front of an apartment building on New York’s Upper East Side waiting for my appointment with a hypnotist who promised to end my tobacco habit. Although I had little faith in that sort of hocus-pocus, I was so afraid that it might work, I anxiously stood outside the building chain-puffing on what I feared would be my last cigarettes. It turned out that they were. The hypnotism worked, but I suspect that the embarrassment I would have suffered had I continued to smoke after I had told all my friends that I was spending $400 on the hypnosis session might have helped, too. The largest known percentage (30 percent) of US cancer deaths is due to tobacco. Epidemiology suggests that because I stopped smoking in my thirties, my chances of dying of lung cancer before age seventy-five are about double those of someone who never smoked, but they are considerably below the twentyfold higher risk of smokers who never quit.

  Activists such as the folks at the Pesticide Action Network frequently claim that Americans are in the midst of a “cancer epidemic” and vaguely assert that there is a “growing scientific consensus that environmental contaminants are causing cancer in humans.” What contaminants? In 2009, Wall Street Journal MarketWatch columnist Paul Farrell pronounced the litany: “Consider the deadly impact of insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, detergents, plastics … the list is endless.”