The Sunday Times November 14, 2021 25
COMMENT
Matthew Syed
We are too emotional about risk —
no wonder we make bad decisions
An irrational fear of nuclear has exacerbated the energy crisis. Such faulty thinking pervades our lives
long warned of the risks of climate
change but has simultaneously
exaggerated the risks of one of the
cleanest and safest forms of technology
that could have helped us to address it —
and still can. Nuclear would also have
provided surety of supply, removing
dependence on potentially hostile
foreign powers. This is, to my mind, a
tragedy.
But there is another insight provided
by nuclear power. You see, one of the
ways that early designers sought to
reduce the (relatively small) dangers of
nuclear energy was to add safety
features to the reactors. They looked
sensible — at least on the surface. A
classic example in 1966 was the
introduction of a zirconium plate inside
an early prototype reactor. This reduced
the danger that materials would burn
through the containment walls.
But the industry quickly learnt a truth
about technocratic fixes. Adding new
features, however well intended, can
increase the complexity and
unpredictability of the system. The
zirconium plate, for example, caused a
partial fuel meltdown by falling off and
blocking a cooling pipe. Thankfully, this
was just a prototype, but the experience
taught a key lesson: safety is often better
served by predictable designs fused with
a transparent culture that rapidly
reports deviations from standard
operation. This provides the scope for
incremental, rational improvement.
And I can’t help thinking that there is
a lesson here for that complex,
unpredictable system we call society.
Take, as an example, tax policy.
Chancellors, not unlike the early
designers of nuclear reactors, like to
introduce their own technocratic fixes toimprove economic performance. A tax
break here and a relief there, with a
few wheezes to gain a headline or two.
Each one is sensible when assessed
according to its own, internal logic. But
the overall effect is to dramatically
increase the complexity and
unpredictability of the system.
Consider that under Gordon Brown, a
tinkerer par excellence, the tax code
trebled in size. Even under George
Osborne, who eulogised simplification,
it doubled again. A wise leading article in
Taxation magazine notes that the code
now stands at ten million words, eight
times longer than Marcel Proust’s À la
Recherche du Temps Perdu, the world’s
longest novel (Hong Kong’s tax code is
just 350 pages by comparison). No
chancellor or tax expert can now
predict how a new relief will
dynamically interact with other
elements of the code, creating loopholes
and anomalies that provide lucrative
opportunities for accountants but huge,
dead-weight losses to business and
society.
And this offers two conclusions that, I
think, have general application. First, we
should assess risk statistically rather
than intuitively. Unless we do so, we will
continue to make dangerous strategic
errors, not least in the coming years on
climate change.
Second, we should not assess policies
in isolation but in terms of how they
influence the properties of the broader
system. In short (and forgive the stab at
poetry), we need to analyse risk
statistically while thinking holistically.
It’s a truth that our political class and,
indeed, much of the media would do
well to reflect on.
@MatthewSyedThe tax code
is now eight
times longer
than Proust’s
great novel
I
n the days after 9/11, images of
planes flying into the twin towers
circulated through the media. The
pictures were dramatic and
terrifying. Perhaps understandably,
people were gripped with fear and
started to change their behaviour as
a result. One of the most significant
changes was that many Americans
stopped using planes for interstate travel
and turned to cars instead. They thought
they would be safer.
But there was a problem with that
approach — and you’ve probably
guessed it. On a per-mile basis, driving is
about 750 times more dangerous than
flying. The attempt to reduce the risk by
avoiding air travel therefore had the
effect of increasing risk overall.
According to one authoritative estimate,
1,595 additional Americans were fatally
injured in car accidents as a direct result
the following year — well over half the
number who died in the twin towers.
I mention this because it illustrates a
systematic bias in the way that humans
intuitively assess risk. Instead of doing
so on a statistical basis, we do so on an
emotional basis. We use the gut rather
than the head. As Dan Gardner puts it in
his book Risk: The Science and Politics of
Fear, “we routinely encounter risks —
even eating breakfast can kill — so we
routinely decide which risks are worth
worrying about. Overwhelmingly, these
judgments are felt, not calculated.”
And this has particular relevance
today in the aftermath of the Cop
conference. For the past few decades the
majority of western nations have largely
turned their backs on the clean fuel
provided by nuclear energy. And they
have done so for much the same reason
that American citizens turned theirbacks on flying. The nuclear industry
has had its own high-profile, high-
emotion disasters. You can probably
name them: Three Mile Island,
Chernobyl, Fukushima.
Nobody died in the first of these
incidents and only one in the third
(though some hospital patients and
others died because of the evacuation);
the second had little relevance to the
West because it was largely caused by a
faulty Soviet design. But this didn’t seem
to matter in the public debate that
followed them. These were vivid,
spectacular meltdowns, involving a
strange and alien technology. The
political left in many nations used them
to demonise nuclear power, in cahoots
with a cowardly political class. This is
why nuclear today makes up a fraction
of the energy needs of most nations,
including our own.
Perhaps it goes without saying that a
statistical analysis presents a different
picture. Measured by fatalities per
terawatt hour of energy produced, coal
causes 24.6 deaths, oil 18.4 deaths and
natural gas 2.8 deaths. Nuclear, by
contrast, causes just 0.07 deaths. It is
also vastly cleaner, producing three
tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per
gigawatt hour, compared with 820 for
coal, 720 for oil and 490 for natural gas.
Even solar and wind produce more
emissions than nuclear, according to the
Our World in Data website.
I am not suggesting nuclear is perfect.
There are big upfront costs and
important issues regarding waste
disposal (although new designs may be
able to use waste as a source of fuel), but
it nevertheless reveals a paradox that
will not be lost on many observing the
Cop process. The green movement has“I forget whether I collaborated
“Who says men can’t multitask?” with the Meghan book”“I’m waiting until Black Friday
to buy a cut-price peerage”NEWMAN’S
WEEK
“I’m hoping to replace Michael Fawcett
as Prince Charles’s confidant”Life has been kind to Huw Merriman,
the Tory MP for Bexhill and Battle,
who spent years practising financial
law, owns a farm and land in East
Sussex and now occupies a safe seat
with a 26,000 majority. But he wants
you to know how unfair this politics
business is. Last week Merriman, 48,
wrote to local members declaring: “It
hasn’t failed to register with me that
some of my colleagues are getting paid
more money than I am and, as a
correlation, doing less work as an MP
than I am. I’ve long argued for our pay
to be measured by our performance.”
Performance-related bonuses for MPs:
truly an idea whose idea has not, and
will never, come.lWhat with a spiralling NHS
background, a resurgent pandemic
and troops sent to the Belarus border,
the government is keeping its
priorities in check. Atticus
understands conversations are afoot to
drop the “IS” in Kwasi Kwarteng’s
department, Business, Energy and
Industrial Strategy (BEIS), to reflect
the government’s new approach to
economic management. The man on
the Clapham omnibus will be fizzing
with excitement.lThe chef Anton Mosimann, who has
cooked for four generations of the
royal family, held a dinner on Friday
night to mark the handing-over of his
Belgravia dining club to his two sons.
He told guests, who were treated to his
famous mushroom risotto and fillet of
beef, about cooking for political
figures including Jimmy Carter and
Jacques Chirac, who told him that
while his dinner with the then prime
minister Tony Blair wasn’t “good”, the
food had been. Mosimann started out
with less illustrious customers.
Whenever a prisoner broke out of the
jail near his family’s home in
Switzerland, police would always
search the family restaurant: it used to
offer escapees a free meal.l It will take some doing for Tory
backbenchers to return to their pre-
Brexit levels of indiscipline, but a
leaked message from Nigel Mills, the
MP for Amber Valley, shows just how
much authority Boris Johnson has lost
of late. In an openly seditious post on
the MPs’ WhatsApp group, Mills, 47,
has called for a independent review of
MPs’ outside interests, declaring: “The
important thing for us is that we
ensure this looks like a one-off and
doesn’t become an issue of our values
ie probity doesn’t matter as long as
we’re doing popular things. We need
to get in control of this in a calm
manner before any more storms
provoke knee jerk reactions we
regret.” Mills was once caught
playing Candy Crush on his iPad
during a work and pensions
committee meeting, beyond which
Atticus cannot fault his commitment to
ensuring that MPs are doing, erm,
their jobs.The Department of Health and Social
Care, Matt Hancock’s former fiefdom,
has declined freedom of information
requests for correspondence between
him and his paramour Gina
Coladangelo, saying it has found 2,349
potentially relevant documents and
“we have calculated that it will take a
DHSC official an average of two or
three minutes to initially review each
email”.
That, a keen arithmetician tells
Atticus, amounts to between 78.3 and
117.5 hours, or three working weeks.
Hancock’s rumoured memoir of his
experiences as health secretary during
Covid-19 is going to need a good editor.Hancock’s emails
are a labour of love
Grass is greener on
other Tories’ farms
ATTICUS
GABRIEL POGRUND
Huw Merriman MP, a landowner and
former banker, wants to be paid more