Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe

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Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Greg Ip (Author), Jeremy Arthur (Narrator), Hachette Audio (Publisher)

4.1 86 ratings

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How the very things we create to protect ourselves, like money market funds or antilock brakes, end up being the biggest threats to our safety and well-being.

We have learned a staggering amount about human nature and disaster - yet we keep having car crashes, floods, and financial crises. Partly this is because the success we have at making life safer enables us to take bigger risks. As our cities, transport systems, and financial markets become more interconnected and complex, so does the potential for catastrophe.

How do we stay safe? Should we? What if our attempts are exposing us even more to the very risks we are avoiding? Would acceptance of danger make us more secure? Is there such a thing as foolproof?

In Foolproof, Greg Ip presents a macro theory of human nature and disaster that explains how we can keep ourselves safe in our increasingly dangerous world.

Listening Length

8 hours and 43 minutes
Author

Greg Ip
Narrator

Jeremy Arthur
Audible release date

October 13, 2015
Language

English
Publisher

Hachette Audio
ASIN

B0167A5C1I
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	8 hours and 43 minutes
Author	Greg Ip
Narrator	Jeremy Arthur
Audible.com Release Date	October 13, 2015
Publisher	Hachette Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B0167A5C1I
Best Sellers Rank	#390,470 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #35 in Microeconomics (Audible Books & Originals) #120 in Macroeconomics (Audible Books & Originals) #134 in Disaster Relief Studies

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4.1 out of 5

86 global ratings

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Jason

Excellent, thought provoking, subtle, wide ranging

Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2015

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Foolproof was excellent and much more subtle and thought provoking than its subtitle “Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe” would lead you to think. Instead of a retread of the well known Peltzman effect (the idea that innovations design to enhance safety just lead to greater risk taking without necessarily increasing safety) the book is actually a subtle and wide-ranging exploration of when it is true, when it is not, and its implications (e.g., seatbelt—the original Peltzman claim—actually don’t have the effect because people forget they are wearing them so don’t actually alter their behavior much, but antilock breaks are something you directly engage with while driving and lead to less safe driving). The wide-ranging aspect is a substantial amount of economics which is Greg Ip’s speciality, especially the recent financial and eurozone crises, but also safety in areas like food, floods, wildfires, automobiles, airplanes and professional football. Although Ip somewhat heroically tries to extract some lessons from all of this, the real strength of the book is tying together disparate topics and making you realize that there are no easy answers to any of these questions. That said, I personally find myself generally more sympathetic to what Ip calls the engineers (i.e., the people who try to make innovations to increase safety) rather than the ecologists (i.e., the people who worry about preserving the ecosystem as a whole without disturbances like new safety innovations). But overall an exciting read and thought provoking whether or not you agree with every part of it.

17 people found this helpful

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David J. Aldous

Safety today or safety tomorrow?

Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2016

Verified Purchase

It is widely accepted that the policy of suppressing natural forest fires has had two undesirable consequences. One is that more combustible material will make subsequent fires bigger; the other is that the lack of experience of recent fires encourages people to build in areas subject to natural fires, thereby increasing the impact of subsequent larger fires. This book describes other contexts in which measures to reduce risk that are sensible in the shorter term may be harmful in the longer term. The emphasis is on the second effect -- that changing perception of risk may cause changes in human behavior. In economics, for instance, the "Great Moderation" of comparatively stable macroeconomics (growth, inflation and interest rates), perceived as a permanent state of affairs controllable by government, undoubtedly encouraged greater risk-taking by both households and financial institutions, and set the stage for the financial crisis of 2007–08.

The author paints a broad picture: river flooding and antibiotic resistance, catastrophe insurance and credit default swaps, automobile and airplane safety, and a dozen more topics. He writes in a familiar modern style -- brief histories of the topic, accompanied by interviews with or stories about individuals.

To me, the book constitutes a very readable part of a first look at the big picture of risk in the "public policy" sense. However, looking at these particular topics through this particular lens gives only part of the story. As another reviewer commented, if you want to engage a conversation with someone knowledgeable about one of these topics, you had better learn a lot more.

2 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Good Book on Human Behaviour but Too Focused on the Financial System

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2016

Verified Purchase

Don't get me wrong it's a great book. Lots of nice tidbits of history.

Given the author's background in Financial Journalism, it is unsurprising that stories of financial disasters and the events leading to them take up a lot of pages. Greg has of course done a good job in relating them to the main theme of the book, the safety paradox (how making trying to make ourselves safer from one thing makes prone to disaster elsewhere).

If you like a good insightful read on the human obsession of self preservation and protection then this is an interesting book. It covers a lot of topics but is very heavy on financial disasters and their history.

There was great potential to show insights into what neuro-psychological research has revealed about our behaviour but sadly that was lacking in this book. It is a good book to read once but not something I'd keep as reference.

4 people found this helpful

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