Panicology
Page 15
Death by Phone
‘Mobile phone blamed for fatal road accident’ Guardian
Death on the road, perhaps in dramatic circumstances and often involving children or young people, with a phone as a contributory factor gets expansive coverage in the media. ‘Was death crash girl texting at the time?’ is an example of the sort of tragic story that makes heart-wrenching reading. In one case, a lorry driver drove into the back of a stationary car while punching the keypad of his new phone, killing a young woman. He admitted dangerous driving. In another, it was the person suspected of using the phone who was killed, leaving the relatives fighting for the person’s reputation. The common theme in the stories is that people’s lives are ended as a result of a moment of stupidity or carelessness.
What are the facts behind the emotion? Mobile, or cell, phones have been around for a long time, but it is only during the last decade that their use has become widespread among the population. Comprehensive network coverage means that they are increasingly used by drivers of vehicles. In an increasing number of countries, including Britain, it is now illegal to drive while using a mobile phone.
But just how dangerous is it to drive while using a mobile phone? While it must be more dangerous to drive using a mobile phone than to drive not using a mobile phone, how does this particular in-car diversion compare with others? Once again we are faced with imperfect data. Information has not as a rule been collected at accident sites to assess whether mobile phone usage might have been a contributory factor – robust data would in any case be hard to collect. Breathalyser tests are now conducted as a matter of course in many countries when an accident has occurred, improving our knowledge enormously about the role that alcohol plays in such events. But as yet, information on other stimulants, such as drugs, or diversions, such as mobile phone usage, is not in general collected at the accident scene. The number of accidents where mobile phones are known and declared to have been a contributory factor are very small but in all probability are just the tip of the iceberg.1
Accordingly, we are left relying on specially conducted research. One early and much-quoted example in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 looked at the mobile phone call records of nearly 700 drivers who had been involved in vehicle collisions resulting in substantial property damage.2 It concluded that the risk of collision when using a mobile phone was at least 3 to 6½ times higher than when one was not being used. It concluded that the relative risk was similar for drivers who differed in personal characteristics such as age and driving experience, and was the same during the day as the night, in winter and in summer.
‘Mobiles worse than drink driving’ was how one piece of research conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory was reported, which suggested ‘talking on a mobile phone while driving is more dangerous than being over the legal alcohol limit’.3 This research involved a panel of twenty volunteers using a driving simulator to measure reaction times and stopping times while using a mobile phone and under the influence of alcohol. The research said reaction times when talking on a mobile were, on average, 30 per cent slower than when just over the legal alcohol limit, and nearly 50 per cent slower than when driving sober. Drivers on the phone were also less able to maintain a constant speed and found it more difficult to keep a safe distance from the car in front. There is no reason not to believe the results of this test, although without more details and bearing in mind the small number of subjects – and the knowledge that the study was sponsored by an insurance company – the detail of the results should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt.
Some of the other research might be a bit less robust and therefore more open to misinterpretation. One poll of over 1,000 motorists by consumer magazine What Car? was reported under the headline ‘10 million ignore the law on phone calls at the wheel’.4 Only 58 per cent of those polled said that they fully observed the law and did not use their phone when driving – grossing up the remaining 42 per cent leads to the figure of 10 million. The article went on to say that the figures ‘suggest that driving while using a handheld phone is 20 times more prolific than recent Department of Transport research claimed’. This phrase alerts the reader to a yawning gap in the message coming from two different data sources, adding to scepticism and concern, but unfortunately in this case probably erroneously. The official figures come from a survey, conducted in April 2003, suggesting that 2.4 per cent of drivers, roughly one in forty, are using a mobile phone at any moment in time.5 The two figures are very different, but both are plausible as they are measuring different things.
One of the more interesting conclusions from both the New England Journal of Medicine and the Transport Research Laboratory studies is that hands-free kits were almost as ‘dangerous’ as handheld phones. The former study concluded that hands-free units ‘offered no safety advantage over handheld units’. The latter study said that under normal circumstances the braking distance for a car travelling at 70 mph, the speed limit on Britain’s motorways, is 31 metres. This increased to 35 metres with alcohol, 39 metres with a hands-free phone and 45 metres with a handheld mobile. It is interesting to note that, despite this evidence, legislation and public opinion in virtually all countries ignore the risk from hands-free phones while punishing those found to be driving using a handheld phone or over the limit for alcohol.
So if it is conclusive that the use of mobile phones while driving is more dangerous than not using mobile phones, why do governments – and pressure groups for that matter – shy away from the prospect of a proper risk assessment of other in-car activities? Perhaps it is because any such assessment could well conclude that there are many more practices and conditions – and perhaps even people – that should be banned. Almost any form of in-car diversion, physical or mental, such as talking, controlling children, map reading, loud music, smoking or eating, ought to be studied and, if appropriate, be banned.
There are also other less obvious risks while driving. One such example, resulting from research conducted in the Czech capital, Prague, suggested that the significant minority of the population with latent toxoplasmosis – cysts in neural and muscular tissues – had an odds ratio of between two and three times higher risk of an accident. And often accidents are not the fault of the vehicle driver. Many of the road accident deaths are of pedestrians, some of whom may have been talking on a mobile phone while crossing the road. Would it be sensible to introduce laws to dissuade people from speaking on the phone while crossing the road?
The research on driving while using mobile phones is more advanced in America than elsewhere. One piece of research estimated that each day mobile phones in the US accounted for nearly 1,000 reported collisions, 1,700 total collisions, 317 persons with injuries, two deaths, and 99 lost years of life expectancy.6 The research concluded that regulations controlling the activity ‘may be justifiable because the benefits and harms do not always involve the individual who has a cellular telephone’, but also noted that other regulations, such as limiting the access of teenage males to cars, could be more cost-saving to society.
The risk of being killed as the result of a road accident caused by the driver using a mobile phone is not large. Regulations making illegal the use of a handheld phone while driving came into force in the UK in December 2003 and have also been brought in in many other countries. But even if the number of these types of accidents stabilizes or declines, it seems likely that the keen human interest element in such stories means that they will still feature strongly in the media.
There are two other factors that are likely to see such stories prosper. The first is the refusal of a minority of the population to accept the new laws. A National Post story headlined ‘Selfish cellphone users have Toronto police fuming’ quoted a number of senior members of the community explaining in forthright manner why they would not support a ban. One even suggested that he would set up a business selling tinted windows so that those using their phones while on the move could not be spotted by the police.
5. The Workplace
Money makes the world go around, and when we perceive a threat to our livelihoods we tend to panic. Globalization is a relatively new cloud on the horizon, but discrimination of one sort or another – we discuss that between men and women here – has been around for much longer. Too much work can lead to stress – and of course work itself can be dangerous.
No Work or Low Pay
‘Profits of doom’ Financial Times
‘Black Thursday, as 1,500 jobs go’, was the headline on the day after three leading British firms announced their plans to shift production abroad. The spokesman of one of the companies said that there was ‘no commercially viable alternative’ to the move of production to China. The trade union representative said, ‘British workers are once again paying the price of globalisation without any perceived benefit.’ One American worker faced with downsizing at a Detroit engine plant said, ‘It’s a helpless kind of feeling.’ His union leader said, ‘The Chinese are coming.’
One of the unwritten rules of capitalism is that the workers in companies with rising profits are rewarded with higher pay. But this tacit arrangement has taken a new twist as multinationals across the industrialized world enjoy very high profit growth while the wages of many workers in their home markets in the West, and especially those on low earnings, are failing to keep up with inflation. The hit has been felt in the last couple of years, when taxes and energy prices have been rising, straining household budgets. Income growth is being secured as a result of this corporate success but by the peasants-turned-workers in the developing world. While the working classes in the West might struggle, those at the top are doing fine: owners and directors enjoy large pay increases and benefit from stock options and performance-related bonuses, while the financial community and investors gain from the buoyant mergers and acquisitions activity and share price rises.
The shrinking range of especially manufacturing jobs and stagnation of blue-collar wages in the West has arisen, as ever in the world of economics, due to a complex cocktail of events, but globalization has played a large part. In the good old days, western workers enjoyed a near monopoly access to western investment: American companies generally invested in America and British companies in Britain and they employed local labour because there was nowhere else to go. Most of the products were sold in the country of origin, but some were exported. Globalization, however, has changed that as work has been exported from developed countries. As a result, ‘Distrust of globalization has probably never been higher in the past 60 years,’ according to one Canadian columnist.1
It has been estimated that, as globalization has taken hold over the last two decades, the number of workers in what might be described as the market economy has doubled from roughly 1½ billion to nearly 3 billion, mainly as a result of the opening up of China and India, but also of the fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s. The basic appliance of the rules of supply and demand would suggest that such a large increase in the supply of labour in a relatively short time, with output growing more slowly, will lead to job losses or wage cuts where wages are highest. It is natural that the bargaining power of labour declines in such circumstances, a position exacerbated by the fall in the strength of trade unions.
But as one American columnist noted,
Globalization isn’t working out as promised… Americans were assured that new trade accords and China’s membership of the World Trade Organization would mean better living standards for American workers. That’s because China and other countries supposedly would buy American exports. In reality, American manufacturing jobs have been decimated, and the US is running an unsustainable and destabilizing trade deficit, especially with China.2
The phenomenon of job exporting started in manual, blue-collar jobs but is now spreading to many professions. In the 1980s and early 1990s the low earners fell further behind the middle class while the rich pulled ahead. Now the poor are keeping pace with the middle, but the rich are pulling away. The share of total income captured by the top hundredth in the US doubled from 8 per cent in 1980 to 16 per cent in 2004.
It is no wonder that most of the nervousness about globalization is directed at China. It accounts for one in five of the world’s population and is more than four times the size of the US and three times the population of the European Union. Few in the West have been to China; even fewer can communicate in Mandarin. The mystery is enhanced because of the country’s traditional policy of secrecy, which began to unwind only twenty-five years ago with a process of economic liberalization.
On all accounts – although the quality of official statistics is notoriously very low – China has made considerable progress during that time: the economy has increased twelvefold, and trade with the rest of the world by a factor of thirty. In the last decade China’s GDP has overtaken that of Canada, Italy and the UK, and is on course to overtake that of Germany soon, making it the world’s third-largest economy after the US and Japan. These figures, however, grossly understate the real size of the Chinese economy once adjustment is made for the country’s relatively low cost of living. Such adjustments suggest the Chinese economy is perhaps four times larger than the crude figures – an estimate supported by China’s capacity for electricity generation, estimated at around five times that of the UK.
China, and India too, are rapidly moving up the technological ladder. China is already graduating over 1 million scientists and engineers each year,3 and it is estimated that, by the end of the decade, China will graduate more PhDs in science and engineering than the US. The plummeting cost of telephone calls means that all sorts of service-sector jobs, not just call centres, can also be exported. And although the negative consequences of the growth in China and India are currently focused on the very expensive labour markets of developed western countries, they have also been affecting workers in Latin America, South Africa and the more developed areas of Asia too.
The impact of globalization is far more pernicious than the shifts in trade or industrial structure we saw a generation ago. Then, one industry such as coal mining would be in decline, or one firm would close or relocate, but now the impact on the West is much wider than this. As a constant flow of manufacturing workers in Britain lose their jobs as Chinese imports rise, they will seek employment in other sectors, such as retailing or construction, depressing wages in those sectors too. Some blue-collar workers find this transition and the required retraining hard, but accountants, sales people and drivers, for example, will find a switch to other sectors more manageable.
The downward impact on the income of many households would have become more apparent already had it not been for rising house prices (making many people feel richer), rapid increases in consumer borrowing and the increase in the economically active proportion of the working-age population. It is also true that the industrialization of China and other countries has prompted dramatic deflation in the prices of many goods. For example, in the UK, the average annual price decline was 20 per cent for IT equipment, 6 per cent for clothing, and 5 per cent for toys, between 2000 and 2006. These offsetting trends cannot continue for ever, and when they stop, the disadvantages of globalizati
on and technological advance will become more apparent to more people.
It will then become clearer that globalization is about massive waves of income redistribution: from workers to consumers, as they can shop around ever more widely for cheaper goods; from rich labour to poor labour, as employment expands rapidly in developing countries; and from energy users towards energy producers, as the demand for energy soars in developing countries.
The industrial structure of countries is constantly changing. The decline of traditional industries such as coal mining, iron and steel and textiles and clothing was, of course, firmly in place for decades in the UK and elsewhere before it became fashionable to talk about China. Now unfashionable state intervention often masked or delayed the decline, but the trends were clear. In Britain, manufacturing employment peaked at 9½ million fifty years ago and is now just 3 million, and a million of those jobs went in the last decade under the Labour government.
Not all industry has declined in the West. The share of finance and business services, for example, has grown substantially – and is now twice as large as manufacturing in the UK. Even though heavy industry has been decimated in the West, other sectors, such as publishing, pharmaceuticals and motor vehicles, are expanding. The statistics can also deceive – when a manufacturing company outsources its IT, catering or cleaning, the manufacturing sector appears to decline while business services increase, yet the same quantity of goods is being produced by the manufacturer.
Workers in developed countries do not panic about globalization on a week-to-week basis, but the medium-term consequences could be considerable. Alan Blinder, a former US Federal Reserve vice-chairman, said about off-shoring in a congressional testimony, ‘We have seen only the tip of a very big iceberg,’ adding, ‘Tens of millions of additional American workers will start to experience an element of job insecurity and downward pressure on real wages that has hitherto been reserved for manufacturing workers.’4 He predicts that the key labour market divide going forward will not be between high-skilled and low-skilled workers, but between services that can be delivered electronically from off-shore and those that cannot be. He estimated that between 22 and 29 per cent of all current American jobs might potentially be offshorable. Perhaps people in the West should become waiters or brain surgeons rather than typists or researchers.