We the Wimps
by William Ecenbarger

America is losing its edge because
Americans have lost their guts.

If things were the way they are now back then: The Wright Brothers might stay in the sand at Kitty Hawk--this thing might crash! . . . Ben Franklin might take his kite and go home--electrical storms are dangerous! . . . Andrew Carnegie might not go into the steel business--too risky for an immigrant!

It begins as soon as we awake. Turn on the light, and we risk electrocution--several hundred people are killed each year in accidents involving home wiring or appliances. Start downstairs to put on the coffee, and you're really asking for it--about 7,000 Americans die in home falls each year. Brush your teeth, and you may get cancer from the tap water....And so it goes throughout the day--commuting to work, breathing the air, working, having lunch, coming home, playing, back to bed....

Not to mention international terrorism, a depleted ozone layer, denuded rain forests, loss of job, melting polar icecaps, toxic and nuclear wastes, murder on the streets, bezene-laced Perrier water, radon gas, asbestos, toxic-shock syndrome, grapes with cyanide, apples with Alar, acid rain, medical wastes, nitrites in bacon, carcinogens in Scotch, antibotics in animal feed, cholesterol, too many planes in the sky, cyanide-laden painkillers...

No doubt about it: America is a dangerous place.

But it's always been that way. In fact, America right now is less dangerous than it's ever been. Why then do Americans seem less inclined to take risks that ever before? Why, when our food is the safest in the world, are we a nation of food neurotics? Why are a people whose ancestors faced down death to sail to our shores afraid to board an airliner to make the reverse trip? Why do we seek thrills in amusement parks but stay off the roller coaster of life?

It's nothing less than the yellowing of America. There is widespread concern in both the business and academic worlds that Americans' fear of risk--or at least their inability to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable risks--is stifling us economically and technologically and sapping our national morale.

A whole new academic field, risk communication, has been created to deal with Americans' misunderstanding of risk. Professor Aaron Wildavsky of the University of California at Berkeley complains that Americans want a "zero-risk" society, and Donald MacGregor, a risk expert with a study group called Decision Research Corp., intones: "We want to be removed from the natural law of chances, and we want somebody to be accountable when things go wrong."

At every level, American life is spiced with paranoia. We are preoccupied with personal and social security, and for many of us our greatest challenge is staying out of trouble. We are a nation choked with anxiety over what we eat, drink and breathe. Our corporations avoid visionary investments, such as solar power, because there's no money in it--meaning there's no money in it right now. A big company that risks capital is accused of "wasting stockholder's money" and could even become the target of a takeover bid. Free enterprise has become frightened enterprise, and we have forgotten that the willingness to risk failure is an indispensable part of any act worth doing.

Not surprisingly, our national leaders, such as they are, reflect this timidity. We have bred a crop of gun-shy politicians, incapable of addressing our national ills. The worst thing a politician can do today is make a mistake.

So it's 54-40 or compromise.... Circumnavigate every mountain.... Give me liberty or give me my La-Z-Boy.... Damn the torpedoes, let's get out of here.... Where are the Amerlia Earharts, the Andrew Carnegies, the Dian Fosseys, the Thomas Edisons?

Our ancient ancestors took risks, and one reason that Homo sapiens rules the earth is that we are history's most daring animal. It was risk-taking Americans who built our industries, tested our airplanes and pioneered artificial-heart implants. Immigration, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and the space program all involved considerable risk.

Americans still revere the image of the lone cowboy, riding off into the sunset in search of his destiny--while sitting in front of their televisions, pushing the remote-control buttons. We've become a nation of timorous couch potatoes, spectators at the game of life, watching as cautious network television executives serve up pablum night after night, refusing to take risks, moored in the safe harbor of sitcoms and cop shows, bracketed by ads warning of the dangers of dirty collars and bad breath. Life is a fearsome thing, and today many of us must muster the courage just to mow the lawn--an activity that according to the National Safety Council, 54 percent of us consider risky.

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Life is a fearsome thing, and today many of us must muster the courage just to mow the lawn--an activity that according to the National Safety Council, 54 percent of us consider risky.

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Paradoxically, we've never been safer or healthier. Throughout the 20th century, there has been a steady decline in the kinds of risks we face. Accident rates from falls, drownings, consumer products and job injuries have fallen; even automobile accidents have decreased. The United States spends about $1.5 billion per day, 12 percent of its gross domestic product, on health care. Life expectancy has reached 75.3 years--up from 70.8 years in just two decades.

Risk aversion figures prominently in the recession. Among our big problems are the federal deficit (the result of decades of consensus-seeking, gutless politicians) and a second-rate public school system (years of dismal public school performance have failed to dent tenure for the nation's 2.3 million public school teachers, whose risk-free security is duplicated on many college campuses).

An enduring legacy of our school system is that we are "risk illiterates"; the odds are that most Amercians don't know what the odds are--whether they're lighting a cigarette, boarding a plane, driving their car or buying a lottery ticket.

What are we afraid of? Why has the American eagle been replaced by Chicken Little?

How extraordinary! The richest, longest-lived, best-protected, most-resourceful civilization, with the highest degree of insight into its own technology, is on its way to becoming the most frightened.

- Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture

Its a hard truth that the majority of American businesses fail within the first five years of their existence, but this didn't deter millions of Americans from striking out on their own in the past. Today, America's pool of new venture capital shrinks by the hour, and venture capital investors look for established firms with track records. Indeed, our huge pension funds, which are notorious for avoiding even a hint of risk, now hold about half the nation's venture capital. All this despite the fact that the safety net of bankruptcy, once considered a stigma and a last resort, is viewed today by many as a savvy way to keep badly managed, over-leveraged firms afloat.

This withdrawal of American venture capital has paved the way for Japanese firms eager to invest in Americans with a better idea. Some Japanese executives have expressed amazement that Americans are spurning so much home-grown technology.

America's overpaid executives have weathered the recession well because of stock options that fill their pockets whether they do well or not. Our top bosses are rewarded no matter what happens to the enterprises they direct. In 1990, according to a Business Week survey, the pay of CEOs rose 7 percent while corporate profits fell 7 percent. The highest-paid boss, United Airlines' CEO, received $18.3 million in salary, bonuses and a stock-based incentive plan, despite the fact that United's profits tumbled 71 percent. No risk involved here. And remember, these are not risk-taking enterpreneurs to begin with; these are cautious, care-taking bureaucrats hired as managers.

Not long ago, we were treated to the spectacle of President Bush going to Japan, accompanied by highly paid American auto executives who were demanding that their Japanese counterparts, who are paid far less than they (U.S. CEOs are paid two to three times more than those in Japan or Germany), stop clobbering them in the showroom.

One of those along for the ride was Robert Stempel, chairman of General Motors. He earned $2.18 million in salary and other sorts of compensation last year--the same year GM announced the closing of 21 plants and the loss of 74,000 jobs.

In declaring last month that we would not seek re-election, U.S. Sen. Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican, excoriated his colleagues for their failure to deal with the budget deficit.

"You have got to take some political risks...It's time to tell the truth. And if you get defeated while doing it, well, it will be worth doing it. At least you do something good for the country. There are people who have given their lives for the country. I don't see what's wrong with giving a political life for the country."

It is an article of faith among politicians that you avoid difficult decisions, especially decisions that could get in the way of the ultimate goal of public office--getting re-elected.

Buttressed by money from every interest except their constituents, and enthroned in districts so carefully gerrymandered that a serial killer could win re-election, our public servants go about the job of staying in office with stunning dedication and success. Never mind that the plight of black Americans worsens by the day; never mind that our education system is staggeringly inept ("If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war," a national commission warned--10 years ago); and never mind that our cities have fallen prey to poverty, drugs and crime to the extent that we have institutionalized a separate urban underclass.

In 1988, we were treated to a presidential campaign that features debates on such compelling cosmic issues as dirty water in Boston Harbor, Massachusett's prison furlough program and flag desecration. This year's campaign is shaping up as even worse.

In his 1990 commencement address, Harold T. Shapiro, the president of Princeton University, noted that "the willingness to risk failure is an essential component of most successful initiatives."

"We face challenges in health care from infancy and childhood to elder care and long-term care. We confront challenges in education, the economy and the environment. We have an inventory of unfulfilled aspirations for families and communities and in connecting ourselves to the rest of humankind in a world that becomes ever more interdependent," Shapiro said.

"If we approach these challenges with a grim determination to avoid risk, we will sentence ourselves to the status quo--or worse. If we rely exclusively on old solutions, we not only will resign our leadership position in economic, political and cultural affairs, but also will fail to reach our objectives. If our collective fear of failure, our fear of taking the risks of listening to new voices, or our demand for all or nothing immobilizes us, we will achieve little change."

Not only are we afraid of risk, but when something happens we look around for somebody to blame--preferably somebody with deep pockets. More than any other place in the world, the Unites States is a land where there can be no tragedy without liability.

Last year, Foture magazine reckoned the annual cost of America's tort system--product liability, medical malpractice and other personal injuries--at $180 billion in jury awards, out-of-court settlements and attorney and expert-witness fees. In addition, businesses pay $21 billion or so for product liability insurance.

There are no precise figures, but it is safe to say that this total is far higher than for any other nation--and partly a reflection of the fact that we now have 800,000 licensed lawyers in the United States, one for every 300 of us.

Peter Huber, author of Liability: The Legal Revolution and its Consequences, calls the added cost of liability protection a "safety tax" and calculates that it amounts to 30 percent of the price of a stepladder.

To be sure, crusading newspaper, government agencies and individuals like Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson have over the years done much to protect Americans from threats growing out of corporate greed. But today another question is relevant: Where are the limits of responsibility for manufacturers when people misuse their products? Put another way, if someone attempts to read this newspaper while driving down the Schuylkill Expressway and has an accident, can he or she sue this newspaper? Does this newspaper have to put warnings on its front page about the dangers of driving and reading?

Far-fetched?

Rather than go before a jury, Sears Roebuck and its suppliers recently gave $4.8 million to a Texas couple who left the propane tank that fueled their gas grill indoors. The husband was badly burned when escaping fumes were ignited by the furnace pilot light. The product literature contained several warnings to keep the tank outside, but the couple's lawyers argued the warnings should have been written in larger letters.

Less successful were the parents of a California boy who committed suicide and who sued the priest for "clergy malpractise."

Because of the fear of liability suits, the nation's 10,000 security firms avoid the very events that demand them for crowd control--rock concerts, football games and the like. In April 1991 the Burlington County freeholders ordered their AIDS counselors to stop handing out free condoms--lest taxpayers be exposed to liability suits. The condoms were part of a counseling program that also urged people to avoid exposure to the AIDS virus through monogamy and abstinence.

In a different America, Thomas Edison conducted more than 9,000 failed experiments in his quest for a long-lasting light bulb filament. When asked about it, he said: "Failures? Nonsense. I'd say 9,000 successes. I've learned 9,000 formulae that don't work."

Just 50 years ago, Chester Carlson tried to sell an idea called xerography, or photocopying. Fifty-five companies told him, "No, for 2 cents people will use carbon paper." But the 56th, a tiny firm in Rochester, N.Y., approved his idea and a billion-dollar industry was born.

Inventors--those risk-taking, better-mousetrap-makers--are a fixture in American history, but today the nation that gave rise to the expression, "Yankee ingenuity" seems to have tossed in the towel. Only about half of all U.S. patents went to U.S. residents and companies last year. Increasing numbers of U.S. patents are being granted to Japanese companies and individuals. Indeed, the four top patent-getters of 1991 were Japanese companies; General Electric Co., which had been No. 1 between 1969 and 1986, came in fifth.

Society's becoming extremely risk-sensitive. We're in a kind of frantic search for security. We want to be removed from the natural law of chances, and we want somebody to be accountable when things do wrong.

- Donald MacGregor, risk expert with
Decision Research Corp., Eugene, Ore.

Grabbing a bite to eat has become an act of courage for many Americans. Every week some new study tells us that this or that is good or bad for us. Often it's a small increase in a minuscule risk based on inconclusive evidence. No one could possible heed all the warnings--chiefly because much of the advice is contradictory. People who gave up regular coffee, for instance, because the caffeine was bad for them quickly found out that decaf coffee might increase their cholesterol.

It's too much to digest. Is it any wonder that a recent poll shows that 36 percent of all Americans say they're given up trying to figure out what's good for them and what's not?

Perhaps most unsettling was the Alar-on-apples scare, for suddenly what had been touted as a way to keep the doctor aware was a health menace. Although health officials from the surgeon general down advised parents not to worry about the spoilage-retardant compound, many of them panicked and schools yanked apples off their lunch menus.

Then tons of Chilean produce were impounded and destroyed--and the entire Chilean economy was thrown into jeopardy--because of just two mildly poisoned red grapes, grapes that were so mildly poisoned that they couldn't have sickened even a small child.

The National Academy of Sciences says the risks of pesticide residues are uncertain and, in any event, are "greatly outweighed by the benefits of eating more fruit and vegetables." Moreover, there is evidence that the cancer-causing potential of chemicals naturally found in foods, such as aflatoxin in peanut butter, is far more hazardous than industrial chemicals, such as the trace amounts in drinking water. According to Science magazine, you are 30 times more likely to get cancer from eating one peanut butter sandwich than you are from drinking one liter of tap water. Yet at last count there were 575 brands of bottled water sold in the United States.

Two-thirds of the scientists who ever lived are living now, and many of them are busily injecting laboratory mice with tons of chemicals and concluding that these substances are hazardous to humans. Part of the problem is that our ability to detect and measure substances present in minute quantities has improved exponentially. In just a generation, we have gone from measuring things in terms of parts per million, to parts per trillion--a million-fold increase in sensitivity.

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop sees a kind of risk illiteracy at work. "People just have an inappropriate sense of what is dangerous. They get overly upset about minor problems. If you translate the weight and time it takes a laboratory rat to develop cancer to a 200-pound man drinking Fresca [which contains artificial sweeteners], it comes out to about two bathtubs-full each day. People dropped Fresca in a minute, but they continued to smoke."

Some experts believe that Americans are not so much afraid of risk as they are misinformed about it, and nowhere is this more evident than in our attitude about moving from one place to another.

Many who are afraid to fly, especially to any area subjected to recent acts of terrorism, think nothing about hopping in their automobiles and maybe forgetting to strap on their seatbelts, and maybe lighting up a cigarette, and maybe, after having a couple of drinks, driving off on the freeway.

When people die in a plane, it's the result of a "crash" -- a forceful, descriptive word, and the Federal Aviation Administration exerts every effort to find out why it happened and takes steps to prevent it from ever happening again.

When people die in cars, it's called an "accident," seldom makes the news, and there is no government agency making an intensive inquiry into the cause. An airliner accident, by contrast, gets frenzied attention in the media, even though the number of victims rarely equals a day's highway or smoking deaths. If the news media ran stories on the number of people who died over the last 24 hours from smoking (an average of about 400 a day) or car crashes (about 125 daily), together with detailed descriptions of how they died and interviews with survivors, perhaps we would be more concerned about life's real risks--driving, smoking and drinking.

Last March, a USAir plane crashed on takeoff at New York's LaGuardia Airport, killing 27 people and injuring 24 passengers. That same day, according to preliminary figures from the U.S. Transportation Department, 131 people were killed on American highways, and an estimated 51,000 were injured in traffic accidents.

Each time we step into a car, there's only a 1-in-300-million chance we'll be killed. But in an average lifetime, we run a 1-in-100 risk of being killed and a 1-in-3 chance of being involved in an accident. We take real risks when we buy a smaller car, when we ride without a seat belt and when we exceed the speed limit (yet millions of radar detectors are sold each year).

When European terrorism flared up in 1986, two million Americans cnahed their travel plans; a boarding pass became the equivalent of a death certificate. The reality, of course, was that most of these people could have done a lot more to enhance their life expectancies by losing 10 pounds and going to Europ as planned. Similarly, the Jaws movies occasioned widespread fear of shark attacks--the odds of which are about 1 in 300 million.

This mathematical equivalent of illiteracy was given a name, innumeracy, which is also the title of a best-selling 1988 book by John Allen Paulos, a Temple University math professor, who came out with a sequel, Beyond Innumeracy, last year.

Paulos says innumerate Americans are not good judges of risk. "It's not so much that the world is such a dangerous place as it is that we're so bad at assessing the risks we face. We perceive the drug problem to involve heroin, cocaine and marijuana; these drugs kill maybe 7,000 or 8,000 Americans a year. In reality, two other drugs are far more serious--alcohol, responsible for 100,000 deaths, and nicotine, responsible for 400,000 deaths."

Part of the problem, says Paulos, is that the study of probability and statistics is not emphasized enough in American schools. Japanese schoolchildren, on the other hand, are given heavy doses of these subjects.

Only innumeracy can explain why last year millions of people bought tickets for a California lottery jackpot in which the odds of winning were 23 million to 1. Despite the towering odds, gambling is spreading like wildfire across the nation. Forty-eight states have some form of legal gaming, and a fair number of small-town economies are dependent on the pull of the slot machine. Indeed, Time magazine reports that more people visit Atlantic City--some 30 million in all last year--than any other place in the United States.

Only innumeracy can explain a study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. When people were asked if they would accept a risky treatment for cancer if it offered a 68 percent chance of survival, 44 percent said they would. But when the question was rephrased to present the risks of the treatment in terms of a 32 percent chance of dying, only 18 percent said they would undergo such a procedure.

Our society, government and industry are nearly paralyzed with fear and regulation. Like spoiled children, denizens demand the unattainable goal of safety without risk, generating massive indecision and misguided policy.

- Lee Clarke, sociology professor
at Rutgers University

Statistically, we face far fewer risks than we did a generation ago. Technology, though often singled out as a risk culprit, in fact has made our world considerably less risky through refrigeration, sanitary sewage disposal, pasteurized milk, safety belts in cars and continued improvements in medical care.

It wasn't too long ago that Americans were building bomb shelters and stocking them with canned goods in the event of a nuclear attack. We don't need to worry about that very much now, though if we did build shelters today we'd probably fret over what kind of food to stock. The real threats to our health are the same as they were a generation ago: smoking, fat-rich diets, alcohol abuse and lack of exercise. And, of course, the random event, the bolt from the blue, the fickle finger of fate. No amount of caution can protect us from the drunken driver who hurtles his vehicle onto the sidewalk as we stroll on our lunch hour. Lawrence Kasden's recent movie, Grand Canyon, is about, among other things, random events that intrude in our lives and are beyond our control.

Some activities involve unavoidable risk. Despite a $2 billion revamp of the space shuttle, experts say the risk of another disaster remains high--perhaps something on the order of four failures for every 100 missions. There is no such thing as a zero-risk society, and in seeking it we are threatening the nation's economic and political stability.

Tennis players know the feeling of risk-aversion; they call it being "too tentative" -- not hitting out on your best shots, trying to merely keep the ball on the court, hoping your oppponent will make the mistake. In other words, turning over your fate to someone else.

What makes us play it safe? Fear--of failure, of bankruptcy, of embarrassment, of injury, of death. But Ralph Keyes, author of Chancing It: Why We Take Risks, says that, among the people he interviewed for his book, "the greatest regrets I heard were not from those who had taken a risk and lost. Invariably, they felt proud for having dared, and even educated in defeat. The real regret, bordering on mourning, came from those who hadn't taken chances they'd wanted to take and now felt it was too late."

Often, the one thing more dangerous than taking a risk is not taking it. Joseph Campbell, the late, great mythologist, described it this way: "But if a person has the sense of the Call -- the feeling that there's an adventure for him -- and if he doesn't follow that, but remains in the society because it's safe and secure, then life dries up. And then he comes to that condition in late middle age; he's gotten to the top of the ladder, and found that it's against the wrong wall....

"If you have the guts to follow the risk, however, life opens, opens, opens up all along the line...I feel that if one follows what I call one's bliss--the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life--doors will open up. They do! They have in my life and they have in many lives that I know of."

Taken from the May 10, 1992 issue of the Inquirer magazine

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