By Thomas R. DeGregori
Posted: Friday, April 12, 2002

ARTICLES
Publication Date: April 12, 2002

Arguments against constructive change take many forms. One is what I have called the myth of the "riskless alternative."

Every change has its risks, whether the change is political, scientific, or technological, but a simple assertion of risk is not in and of itself an argument against change. The risks of change have to be measured against the benefits of change and the risks of not changing. Increasingly, we hear impossible demands for a zero-risk society. In public discourse, scientists are asked to guarantee that an innovation, be it genetically-modified food or a new pharmaceutical, has no possibility of ever causing harm. Given that no reputable scientist can ever answer such a question with absolute certainty, the interrogator has seemingly won the argument by default — if one believes that there is some totally risk-free alternative, either in the status-quo or in some presumed prior way of doing things.

Opposition to change in favor of the status-quo-ante used to be considered a conservative or reactionary position; now it has become the battle cry of presumptive radicals from the streets of Seattle to those of Genoa and beyond. Having "won" the argument by showing that safety cannot be guaranteed with absolute certainty, the believers feel no need to subject their proposed alternatives to the same tests, tests that would often reveal that the radicals' plans carry far more risks than the innovations they oppose.

Along with "riskless" change, there are now demands for "victimless" change. Unfortunately, if there are possible risks, there are always possible victims. If we examine the many changes over the past century — changes that have reduced infant and child mortality over 90%, have given Americans nearly thirty years of added life expectancy, have recently caused an even more rapid growth in disability-free years of life, and have allowed comparable or greater advances in other countries — we will find that all those changes carried risks. Indeed, all those changes had and continue to have organized opposition: chlorination of water, pasteurization of milk, synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, modern medicine, and immunization, to name a few. Pasteurization took nearly fifty years to be introduced into the United States and the arguments against it were identical to those used today against food irradiation.

Most every health intervention carries some risk, but those that we have come to depend upon carry vastly fewer risks than the threat to life and good health from the diseases that they protect against. But again, nothing in life carries zero risk (although some vaccines seem to be getting very close to that). I have a question that I have been asking for over a quarter of a century: If technology and science are killing us, why are we living so long?

Infant and child mortality and morbidity have so successfully been reduced that we, individually and collectively, forget the scourge of the diseases against which we are now protected. Unfortunately, infants and children still suffer from other maladies, many with uncertain causes. Since infants are given a regimen of eleven successive immunizations, it is not surprising that some shots happen to coincide with the onset of an unexplained malady. The anti-science and anti-technology coterie are quick to assign the blame to immunization without a scintilla of evidence, and they frighten parents into not immunizing their children. The evidence is overwhelming that a decline in immunization will eventually lead to an increase in disease, often with death or permanent health impairment following in its wake. In the United Kingdom and Germany, some of these fears have lead to declines in immunization, which have lowered the immunization rate perilously close to the minimum necessary for "herd" or "community" immunity. That could lead to epidemics of diseases such as measles.

There is a role for the genuine radical in calling attention to victims of change, encouraging us to ask, for instance, whether the costs of change are falling unfairly upon certain groups or individuals. Focusing on the victims and the risks sometimes helps us find ways to reduce the adverse outcomes (by making our vaccines ever safer, for instance). The smallpox vaccination that I received as a boy had more antigens than the combined total of all eleven vaccines that are administered to infants and children today. Those who were harmed by the vaccinations obviously knew it, while the vastly greater number who didn't get smallpox (or any other disease against which we were protected) went on with their lives without thinking about the horrors they might have suffered without the vaccinations. One of the problems in defending modern science and technology against its critics is that so many of the benefits are unseen: nasty things that don't happen to us. Suppressing a technology such as immunization creates far more victims that does utilizing it.

In other areas, such as globalization of the world economy, it is not only who is harmed that matters but who and how many benefit. Unfortunately, globalization critics, as is increasingly the case for the critics of most of the modernizing transformations, provide us with a litany of victims or alleged victims without noting the many beneficiaries, such as the hundreds of millions of people who have been able to rise out of poverty as a result of having their economies opened to change. There is a kind of Gresham's Law of social protest whereby the increasingly strident opposition to all globalization drowns out more reasoned arguments for making globalization fairer.

Wealthy advocacy groups — largely controlled by white, northern-European and North American males with sophisticated command of public relations and media access — have created a new form of neo-colonialist imperialism, hijacking the political agendas of many oppressed peoples and misusing the suffering of those people to oppose globalization and change. With six billion people in close to two hundred sovereign political entities, the world is replete with injustices, legitimate grievances, and indigenous groups seeking a just remedy for them. Tragically, they are not able to get a hearing in the media without the aid of the developed countries' advocacy groups. Those advocacy groups demand that the poor of other nations make their claims using slogans that conform to their own ideology and fund-raising needs. To draw media attention to poverty in a southern nation, local activists may have to conform to the party line of northern groups such as Greenpeace. Thus, their real grievances are diluted or lost — as are the grievances of any groups pressured to use the litany of political complaints favored by wealthy countries' elite activist groups.

Justice requires that the poorest and most needy in the world have the opportunity to experience the changes that have benefited the rest of us. They should not be hindered by groups that oppose change for others while enjoying it themselves. Taking reasonable risks turns out to provide us all with greater safety. Those who would force us to pursue the impossible goal of absolute safety put us all in greater jeopardy.

Thomas R. DeGregori, Ph.D., is a Professor of Economics at the University of Houston, is a member of the board of directors of ACSH, and has done development work in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. His book The Environment, Natural Resources, and Modern Technology has just been published by Iowa State Press: A Blackwell Scientific Publishing Company. The article is taken from a book manuscript to be completed later this year.