The tendency to respond to a salient tragedy by removing its cause—such as requiring baseball coaches to wear helmets after a one-in-a-million freak fatality, or laws and precautions during the shark-attack scare—is a remarkable human phenomenon that is usually hard to justify on all-things-considered grounds, especially given possible unintended consequences like reduced caution from a false sense of safety.

normativepending

Speaker

Russ Roberts

Evidence Quote

it's a remarkable human phenomenon that when these kind of events happen we have such a natural visceral instinct to remove the cause ... I wonder whether coaches will take more care or less care of avoiding line drives if they know they're wearing a helmet which is a different type of unintended consequence

Source

Cass Sunstein on Worst-case Scenarios 11/19/2007EconTalk
Created: 6/15/2026, 9:17:23 AM

My Notes

Loading notes...