Economics of Safety
Below is a selected summary of the key points most relevant to workplace safety from the renowned economist, Thomas Sowell’s latest book entitled Economic Facts and Fallacies.
How to Get Unpopular Programs Approved
Most fallacies use vague terms which sound nice and are difficult to argue against eg fair, social justice, equality. Politicians often use this technique to get unpopular and bad policies approved.
Beware of the “Fog of lofty idealistic rhetoric”
Open-Ended Fallacy
No one argues against health, safety, open space, clean air, or clean water. However, these are open-ended objectives, and resources are always limited.
Open-ended demands lead to ever-expanding programs, bureaucracies, and budget blow-outs. There is always more you could do to improve safety, and other worthy social programs, it never ends. So, what should we do?
We as safety professionals need to consider if alternate programs, other than our own pet projects, might provide better safety results and more beneficial use of available resources. Of course, if there is a serious non-compliance or life safety risk we need to be clear about the problem and firm in our advice to management.
Chess-Piece Fallacy
The chess-piece fallacy assumes changing human behaviour is as easy as moving chess pieces on a board eg issue a new policy or procedure. However, everyone has their own preferences, values, and plans, which often conflict with corporate safety experiments.
Our safety leadership foundation course includes an introduction to safety culture, and clearly identifies the difficulty and lengthy time needed to change the corporate culture, particularly for large organisations. Therefore, we need to plan carefully and consult with all our stakeholders before organisational change, and allow sufficient training and time to achieve the desired results.
Zero-Sum Fallacy
Many see “rich” people and think someone must be worse off. This is incorrect, as voluntary transactions would not take place unless both parties benefited. Apple founder, Steve Jobs, made billions, but Apple products have added trillions of dollars to the world economy in communication and business efficiency.
