No radon lobby

Kaiser writes thoughtfully about the costs, benefits, and incentives for different policy recommendation options regarding a recent water crisis. Good stuff: it’s solid “freakonomics”–and I mean this in positive way: a mix of economic and statistical analysis, with assumptions stated clearly. Kaiser writes:

Using the framework from Chapter 4, we should think about the incentives facing the Mass. Water Resources Authority:

A false positive error (people asked to throw out water when water is clean) means people stop drinking tap water temporarily, perhaps switching to bottled water, and the officials claim victory when no one falls sick, and businesses that produce bottled water experience a jump in sales. It is also very difficult to prove a “false positive” when people have stopped drinking the water. So this type of error is easy to hide behind.

A false negative error (people told it’s safe to drink water when water is polluted) becomes apparent when someone falls sick as a result of drinking the water — notice that it would be impossible to know if such a person is affected by bacteria from the pond water or bacteria from the main water line but no matter, any sickness will be blamed on the pond water. We think the risk is low but if it happens, the false negative error creates a public relations nightmare.

I [Kaiser] think this goes a long way to explaining why government officials behave the way they do. This applies also to the FDA and CDC in terms of foodborne diseases (a subject of Chapter 2), and to the NTSB in terms of car recalls. They tend to be overly conservative. In the case of food or product recalls, being overly conservative leads to massive economic losses and waste as food or products are thrown out, almost all of them good.

This reminds me of my work with Phil in the mid-1990s on home radon. The Environmental Protection Agency had a recommendation that every homeowner in the country measure their radon levels, and that anyone with a measurement higher than 4 picoCuries per liter get their house remediated. We recommended a much more targeted strategy which we estimated could save the same number of lives at much less cost. But the EPA resisted our approach. One thing that was going on, we decided, was that there is no pro-radon lobby. Radon is a natural hazard, and so there’s no radon manufacturer’s association pushing to minimize its risks. If anything, polluters like to focus on radon as it takes the hook off them for other problems. And the EPA has every incentive to make a big deal out of it. So you get a one-sided political environment leading to recommendations that are too expensive. Similar things go on with other safety issues in the U.S.

9 thoughts on “No radon lobby

  1. There's no way to measure the net effect of the "overly" conservative strategy — you'd have to add up the losses from throwing out good stuff *plus* the benefits from averting epidemics, etc., of various magnitudes — some very large. Having been averted, they'll never tell us how bad they would've been.

    It's not as though every case of throwing stuff out averts something horrible, but it's a lot of tiny losses that eventually will prevent something gnarly. Economists never think that far ahead and never think of The Seen and The Unseen (despite what some say), so such policies are of course "overly" conservative.

    But they've survived natural selection, so they get the benefit of the doubt, unless a solid case is made that we live in a totally different environment where these strategies reduce rather than boost our fitness. In reality, our world is even more subject to complex relationships that could deliver Black Swans, so these ingrained biases serve us better now than on the African savanna.

  2. Steve, yeah, I agree. I am the Phil from the radon example, and coincidentally I have also done work on protecting airports (and the people in them) from chemical and biological terrorism. So I do speak as an expert (on at least part of this issue) when I say the obvious, which is that the rules and regulations about bringing liquids in your carry-on do nothing to protect against terrorism. (You don't need an expert to tell you this, of course, but I'm here if you need me.) One rule that really gets me is the restriction on the size of the individual containers: you can bring a couple of ounces of shampoo, and of conditioner, and of toothpaste, and so on, but no _single_ container can be bigger than 3 ounces…as if no terrorist would dream of dividing their sarin (or explosives, or anthrax) among multiple containers. Another real mind-boggler is that the rule doesn't apply to "medical supplies" like saline solution: you want to bring in 6 or 8 ounces of saline solution, go for it! Right…but doesn't this mean I can bring in a 6- to 8-ounce bottle of anything I want, as long as it's _labeled_ "saline"? Yep, in practice that is what it means.

    It's not that the TSA, or anybody else, cares how much shampoo or toothpaste or saline you bring, the whole point of the restrictions is that you might put something else in those containers…so an exception for containers that are labeled "contact lens solution" or "saline" makes no sense whatsoever, you could put anything in there.

    So, yeah, Steve, I think this is a clear case of CYA, on a huge scale. If they were to relax these rules, and someone smuggled in explosives or chem/bio weapons using a liquids container, people would be outraged that they weren't taking any steps whatsoever to protect people from this. Instead, people are subjected to longer airport security lines, hassles with trying to buy travel-sized containers of things, etc., but those things aren't figured in the incentives of the people who make the rules.

    Still, you can only blame the government bureaucrats up to a point: stupid though it is, people really would be outraged if a terrorist was able to smuggle in 18 ounces of explosives without being forced to divide it into three-ounce packets. In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.

  3. off-topic

    Prof. Gelman, did you see this paper (http://polmeth.wustl.edu/media/Paper/Schrodt7SinsAPSA10.pdf) to be presented at APSA?

    I have changed my mind in the last few months about philosophy of science, pretty much in the direction of your paper with Cosma Shaliza.

    I found this paper by Shrodt quite strange, preaching about a Bayesianism that it is not what I am learning reading in your and others books. But maybe I am reading your books, Blogs and papers wrongly.

    Thus, since I am just a student, I would like to know what do you think of the claims in the paper. I know you receive a lot of papers and text to comment and I surely don't expect that you read all the stuff people ask you to do.
    But, since this is related to things you are discussing here and elswhere, I thought you may be interested and could coment it.

    Thanks anyway,
    Manoel

  4. Back on-topic. It's taken over 20 years since Willie Horton, but states are finally facing the fact that they can't afford to lock everyone up forever (as in California's three strikes law), as a means of ensuring that there are no parolees who reoffend — which, of course, there will always be, given a reasonable sentence.

  5. Phil: I agree with you 100%. But I feel so bad about flying, because of all the pollution it creates, that I figure that maybe it's just as well that it keeps becoming more and more unpleasant. Or, to put it another way, I feel awkward complaining about the inconvenience of flying, given that I shouldn't really be doing it anyway.

  6. Manoel:

    Yes, please tell this guy about my paper with Shalizi. It could give him a broader perspective, I think. Thank you.

  7. (now officially off-topic)

    For what it's worth, some websites (like ITA Software's Matrix search engine) can estimate the CO2 emissions from the flights you choose. All else being equal, your flight has lower CO2 emissions per passenger if the plane is larger. But all else being equal, the flight also has lower CO2 emissions if it's more direct. Direct flights tend to be smaller, whereas you tend to take larger flights if you make a connection through a hub. I believe the ITA estimator takes all of this into account.

    The EPA estimates that a gallon of gasoline produces 8.8 kilograms of CO2:

    http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05004.htm

    Matrix just now told me that a direct Virgin America flight from Boston to Los Angeles emits 1,393 pounds of CO2. Google Maps says that if I drove between those two cities, I'd drive just about 3,000 miles. The EPA estimates 23.9 miles per gallon for passenger cars, so that 3,000-mile trip would consume 125 gallons of gasoline and thereby emit 1,104 kg of CO2. That's 500 pounds of CO2.

    Not sure whether the ITA CO2 estimate is per-passenger or per-flight. I'd assume per-flight, though I'm not sure. If the flight holds 100 passengers, whereas the car holds four, then CO2-per-passenger is (500 lbs)/4 = 125 pounds-per-passenger for the car, versus 13.93 pounds-per-passenger for the flight.

    That may be cold comfort, viz., "Well, at least those 100 people aren't taking separate cars!", but maybe it helps somewhat.

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