Jeremy Clarkson on not letting tails wag dogs

I am increasingly persuaded that Jeremy Clarkson is the most sensible person in public life. Take, for example, his recent column on the way legislators and regulators allow "the behaviour of one man" to skew "the concept of everyday life for everyone else."

As we know, one man once got on one plane in a pair of exploding hiking boots and as a result everyone else in the entire world is now forced to strip naked at airports and hand over their toiletries to a man in a high-visibility jacket. ...

Last month a Birmingham couple pleaded guilty to starving their supposedly home-schooled daughter to death. Now, of course, there are calls for parents who choose to educate their children at home to be monitored on an hourly basis by people from the “care” industry, and possibly to have their toiletries confiscated. ....

We seem to have lost sight of the fact that throughout history 90% of people have behaved quite normally 90% of the time. Agatha Christie, for instance, was home-schooled and at no point was she forced to eat breadcrumbs from her neighbour’s bird table.

Of course, at the extremes, you have 5% who are goodie-goodies and who become vicars, and 5% who build exploding hiking shoes and starve their children to death.

It’s this oddball 5% that is targeted by the tidal wave of legislation. But making it more difficult to teach your children at home will not stop kids being mistreated.

It just changes the pattern of everyday life for everyone else. This is what drives me mad.

We now think it’s normal behaviour to take off our clothes at an airport. But it isn’t. Nor is it normal to stand outside in the rain to have a cigarette or to do 30mph on a dual carriageway when it’s the middle of the night and everyone else is in bed. It’s stupid.

And last week the stupidity made yet another lunge into the fabric of society with the news that government ministers were considering new laws that would force everyone to take a test before they were allowed to keep a dog.

No, really. Because one dog once ate one child, some hopeless little twerp from the department of dogs had to think of something sincere to say on the steps of the coroner’s court. Inevitably, they will have argued that the current law is “not fit for purpose”, whatever that means, and that “steps must be taken to ensure this never happens again”.

The steps being considered mean that every dog owner in the land will have to fit their pet with a microchip so that its whereabouts can be determined from dog-spotting spy-in-the-sky drones, and that before being allowed to take delivery of a puppy, people will have to sit an exam similar to the driving theory test. The cost could reach £60, and on top of this you will need compulsory third-party insurance in case your spaniel eats the milkman. ...

What good did all the airport legislation achieve? None. It simply means that you and I now must get to the airport six years before the plane is due to leave and arrive at the other end with yellow teeth, smelly armpits and no nail file. Did it prevent a chap from getting on board with exploding underpants? No, it did not.

Happily, however, I have a solution to the problem, a way that normal human behaviour can be preserved. It’s simple. We must start to accept that 5% of the population at any given time is bonkers. There are no steps to be taken to stamp this out and no lessons to be learnt when a man with a beard boards a plane with an exploding dog.

Government officials who are questioned on the steps of coroner’s courts must be reminded of this before they speak. So that instead of saying the current law is “not fit for purpose” and that something must be done, they familiarise themselves with an expression that sums up the situation rather better: “Shit happens.”

Damn straight.

Comments

[David Welker]

I think that the idea of avoiding overreacting outliers in an important one. Of course, controlling outliers is important. Most people are not serial killers, but serial killers must be stopped. That is, even if a behavior is only exhibited by outliers, that does not mean that it is irrational to invest significant resources to combat the problem.

That said, there is the problem where highly unusual, but emotional events drive policy. We may be very well overreacting to shoe bombers and underwear bombers.

The issue with cars accellerating is also a case in point. I am not convinced that all cases are necessarily driver error. As someone trained in software engineering, I can too easily imagine too many situations where the complicated electronic systems that run our cars malfunction due to design flaws to have full faith that there are not some cases where an electronic failure causes unintentional accelleration.

That said, today I was looking at the statistics of investigations by the NHSTA on CNN. If I recall correctly, the number of accellerations investigated was less than 200 over a multiple year period and involving many more manufactures than Toyota. Something like 120 were closed, inaccurately or accurately as driver error.

Maybe some of these cases were closed in error. But regardless, the media is probably paying too much attention to this issue, considering that every year over 35,000 people are killed in traffic accidents. We probably should focus more resources on highway safety. But I am concerned that there is a risk that any additional resources will be misallocated on higher profile risks that in reality are less serious.

A final note. I philosophically disagree with people who think you can put a money value on human life. I think regulations should increase safety as much as physically practical, even if the cost of marginal lives saved ends up being very high. The limitation I would put on such safety measures has more to do with the importance of preserving liberty and freedom rather than saving money. (i.e. sky diving or driving race cars may be dangerous, but people should be free to take risks). I do not think it is possible to attach a non-arbitrary dollar value on a human life.

Anyway, I agree with Professor Bainbridge that we have to be careful not to let outliers distort public policy too much. However, to some degree, overreaction is inevitable. Humans are emotional, which is both a great attribute and a weakness. Thus people will always pay disproportionate attention to unlikely but sensational events -- like shark attacks, for example. Nonetheless, policy tends to be reasonable, although there are specific instances of overreaction.

[Steve ("Professor") Bainbridge]

David: I pay for the bandwidth for this blog. Unless you want to start contributing financially to its upkeep, I'm going to have to impose a word limit on you.

[David Welker]

Professor Bainbridge,

I apologize. I did not realize that this was bothering you. I will comment here less often.

I like the blog, obviously, and will continue reading it.

[Steve ("Professor") Bainbridge]

David: Just try to keep your comments shorter than the original post!