… enter the action hero, smashing the bad guys to bits and saving the day! That is what we are celebrating, expecting and hoping for when the situation demands it. Far more effective though, and likely far cheaper, less destructive would be to prevent the situation that demands hero interventions in the first place.
Back in the real world there are plenty of examples analogous to the above. Think of HIV: millions have contracted the virus and progressed to AIDS. Now treatment is required (aka action hero) to ensure survival. This is urgent, necessary and absolutely right. Yet, far more expensive, requires gargantuan efforts and coordination and needs to be sustained indefinitely. A “better”, longer-lasting, more effective and cheaper alternative would have been to prevent the HIV infection in the first place. Again, considering HIV, the treatment versus prevention debate and priority has swung in either direction. The trouble now is that it’s far, far, easier to quantify the number of pills handed to HIV-positive people, than to definitively quantify the number of HIV infections avoided. Plus, non-events are far less headline-grabbing than events.
Another, yet somehow inverse, example is to be found in the airline industry: the event is a terrorist attack, the non-event is the prevention of such breaches. So, the response to the events of Sept 11, 2001 has been a war, new passport regulations, new scanning technology, endless legislation, and on and on. These are also, interestingly, part of the machinery set up to ensure future non-events, yet it feels like the response is still a reaction to the initial attacks. That’s because it is: On an international policy level, where international relationships are made or broken, nothing (or very little) has changed. We still seem to be stuck in a binary world of us and them, in and out, good and bad. This is slowly changing, but not (fast) enough to remove the perceived need of others to resort to blowing airplanes and soft targets to smithereens.
There are plenty of examples in which non-events would be no much more desirable than events. The final one here is perhaps closest to most people: your own health. We have all heard about the risks of heart attacks as we get older. We are also told about the benefits of physical activity over bad heating habits and lounging in chairs. Yet, despite all this information, we fail to implement those simple steps (best if taken at running speed) that will help avoid all sorts of unpleasant plumbing around our heart – or even death. Trouble is that as we are young the risks are low, so we discount the impact of a future event. As we get older the risks loom larger and the efforts needed to avoid the heart-compromising event are also more demanding. When the attack hits, the risk stares us straight in the face and the full machinery of heroic intervention is set in motion – far more expensive than going for a run, no?
Ultimately, we are, as a race, risk averse, perhaps not because we do not want to “take risks” – we do – but because we discount future risks, we are led to champion heroic interventions and because as a “population” we tend to behave differently than as individuals.
Filed under: Future, HIV/AIDS, Risk, Technology
