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Ours is a society highly attentive to risk: to black swan events (those unexpected and unpredictable occurrences that can have severe or even catastrophic consequences), to near misses (for instance, when planes nearly collide on the tarmac), and to foreseeable yet random disasters—for example, extreme weather events and environmental disasters caused by pipeline ruptures, train derailments, forest fires and ships running aground or foundering on rocks.
Insurance companies speak of “tail” risks, “extreme” risks and “emerging” risks and engage in “downward counterfactual thinking,” a systematic process of understanding why a catastrophic event took place. To prepare for such risks, insurers conduct probabilistic hazard analysis, scour the historical record, calculate a loss’s potential costs and examine how future losses might be averted.
To assess risks, meteorologists engage in stochastic modeling, while structural engineers conduct analyses of seismic hazards and structural risks that might result from the degradation of structural supports due to water penetration, corrosion, subsidence, inadequacies in design and construction and damage caused by construction on adjacent sites. Big businesses devote entire departments to risk analysis, risk assessment, risk modeling and risk management. Today, virtually every profession and institution is expected to track and anticipate risks.
To obviate risk, the federal government monitors terrorist threats and has begun to assess the likelihood of a zoonotic spillover event or a lab leak that might cause another deadly pandemic. A government agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration, coordinates with partner units to watch for asteroids, comets or meteors that strike the earth.
To be sure, anxieties about risk aren’t new. The modern insurance industry emerged during the 17th century as businesses sought to protect themselves from the risks associated with shipping and finance as international trade and commerce expanded. Over time, insurance companies gradually began to offer life, property, liability and other forms of insurance so that businesses and individuals could manage risk.
Even though risk assessment has a long history, worries about safety began to take on heightened significance half a century ago, extending their reach into households and classrooms.
During the 1980s, a torrent of scholarly books and articles began to refer to the modern risk society, beginning with Patrick Lagadec’s 1981 discussion of La civilisation du risque, a catalyst for the development of the fields of strategic risk assessment and crisis management. Lagadec’s book was followed in short order by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky’s Risk and Culture (1982), Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies (1984) and Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1986).
These books’ overarching theme was that as science and technology evolved increased, the ecological, environmental, epidemiological and technological threats to humanity’s well-being escalated. As the authors also pointed out, many of contemporary society’s gravest risks are man-made. They are the artificial and unintentional by-products of economic and technological progress for which no single entity is responsible or accountable.
Global economic integration, these authors demonstrated, further intensified risk, magnifying the possibility that a crisis in one part of the world could have disastrous consequences elsewhere and precipitate a global financial crisis (like the ones that took place in 2000 and 2008).
The collapse of the Cold War order at the end of the 1980s also gave rise to new threats to international stability as various ethnic and national conflicts surfaced or re-emerged.
The risks that contemporary society confronts are especially difficult to reckon with, first of all, because some of the most pressing are invisible to the public, like the depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer. Also, many key risks are probabilistic. Their likelihood is uncertain and perhaps unknowable. The downside risks are high and likely, but whether these risks will materialize is dependent on contingency, circumstances and chance.
The scholarship on risks distinguishes between material risks and perceived risks. Among the contributions of the Douglas and Wildavsky edited volume was to shift the scholarly focus to “the subjective aspect of risk and the ways in which risk is assessed and perceived by individuals.” Their essay collection demonstrated that risk perceptions vary widely across cultural, geographic and historical contexts and reminds us that whole societies or subsets can be highly attentive to some risks while blind to or unmindful of others. Their work also pointed to the crucial role of policy makers and advocacy groups in shining a spotlight on particular risks, sometimes out of all proportion to their actual threat.
The 1970s and 1980s proved to be a watershed in thinking about risk in yet another way, as the meaning of risk underwent a radical expansion. Especially noteworthy was the transfer of the concept of risk from the public sphere to private life. A series of panics erupted in the United States over stranger abductions, poisoned Halloween candy and satanic abuse in daycare centers, fueled in part by an ever-growing number of documented cases of sexual abuse in churches, Boy Scout dens and elsewhere and by mounting anxieties about the increasing incidence of divorce and working mothers.
I and others have traced the discovery of risk, the escalating concern with various threats to children’s well-being from bullying, grooming and various forms of sexual, physical and emotional abuse.
Factors that contributed to the discovery of risk include a growing awareness of the realities of abuse and the prevalence of trauma and mental health issues and as well as a culture of paranoia fed by a sensationalistic news media and later amplified by social media and by an apocalyptic doomerism that broached the possibilities of global self-destruction as a product of artificial intelligence, global warming, infectious disease or some other calamity or cataclysm.
The discovery of risk carried profound for children’s upbringing, both good and bad. Bicycle helmets protected children from potential head injuries but were associated with a decline in bike riding. The geography of childhood grew more circumscribed as parental worries about children’s safety intensified. For the same reason, free, unstructured, unsupervised outdoor play waned.
At the same time, parents and childcare professionals became much more attentive to various behavioral, emotional and learning disabilities, including anxiety disorders, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders, autism spectrum disorders, body dysmorphic disorders, conduct disorders, eating disorders, intellectual developmental disorders, mood disorders, and oppositional defiant disorders.
In the 21st century, concerns about child protection and the avoidance of risk increasingly gave way to safetyism, the notion that vulnerable individuals should be protected from various threats to their emotional and psychic well-being, even if this meant restricting free speech or academic freedom.
The debate over trigger warnings exemplifies the clash of values. One side considers such warnings appropriate ways to prepare individuals who have experienced violence, sexual assault and other traumatic experiences from potentially triggering or distressing content and to create more inclusive, empathetic and supportive learning environments. The other side believes that the demand for trigger warnings contributes to a culture of hypersensitivity and avoidance that reinforces feelings of helplessness and victimhood and discourages instructors from engaging with hot topics or introducing contentious evidence into their classroom.
I myself try to strike a balance. On the one hand, I try my best not to sanitize or whitewash the past. I incorporate audio, images, text and video that likely offend virtually every student in one way or another—not to scandalize but to illustrate the past in its full, often ugly, complexity. On the other hand, I also strive to contextualize those sources and to offer my pedagogical justification.
It seems to me that we would do well to treat risk as a serious academic subject. I would urge history and social science departments to consider incorporating the subject of risk into their curriculum.
I can scarcely think of a better way to encourage students to develop deep understanding, think critically or draw inferences from history than by analyzing various risk-related case studies and scenarios. Such an approach might also help them to better appreciate the challenges that policy makers and regulators regularly face.
For example, ask your students to:
- Investigate a disaster—for example, the 1986 Chernobyl or 2011 Fukushima nuclear disasters—and explain what went wrong.
- Identify a black swan event—for instance, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers—and examine why policy makers (and in the case of Lehman Brothers, regulators) failed to anticipate the event.
- Undertake a counterfactual analysis—perhaps of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina catastrophe—and analyze the policy errors that took place and why responsible authorities failed to act more effectively.
- Look for a tipping point—as in the 1986 Challenger explosion—when different decisions might have led to a very different outcome.
- Evaluate a risk management policy decision—such as the decision to require air bags in cars or ban the production of Freon—and undertake a cost-benefit analysis.
- Analyze a near miss—an example might be the 1993 bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center or 2004’s Hurricane Ivan (which just missed New Orleans)—and ask why policy makers failed to learn from this episode.
- Explore a scenario in which matters might have gone far worse—for example, the 2012 MERS outbreak in Saudi Arabia or the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa or the 2009 collision of US Airways flight 1549 with a flock of geese—and examine why this event didn’t result in an even worse catastrophe.
- Investigate a likely but unpredictable risk—like the city of Houston experiencing three major floods in 2006, 2008 and 2009—and propose various policy and regulatory responses.
- Create a real-world scenario or case study that illustrates the challenges of assessing and managing a recognized or emerging risk.
Americans are of two minds about risk. We tend to think of ourselves as a nation of risk takers. Risk-taking, after all, is the key to innovation and this country’s entrepreneurial spirit. We frequently tell ourselves not to play it safe.
And yet, we also tell our children to avoid risky behavior—to steer clear of drugs, cigarettes, underage drinking and premature sex—even as we recognize that risk-taking is an inevitable part of adolescent growth and development. We associate youthful risk-taking with sensation-seeking even as we encourage risk-taking in the classroom.
We try to distinguish between healthy, positive and intelligent risk-taking and dangerous, negative and chancy risk-taking, but the line is fuzzy. Talk about mixed messages.
Here’s my advice: teach about risk. Offer positive and negative examples. Expose your students to the strategies that businesses, government and individuals use to assess and manage risk and examine why those approaches frequently fail. Maybe, just maybe, this will help your students learn how to embrace risk, conquer unrealistic fears and take the positive risks that pay off.
