I was recently listening to an interview where an economist was criticizing the way modern media reports the news. He said that the mainstream media tends to grab onto a disaster, thrust it into the national spotlight and then ask the question “how do we prevent this from happening again?!”
The economist said this behavior is misguided because some disasters need to happen and trying to eliminate them shouldn’t be an aspiration. The example he gave is this:
Let’s say that you have a house that collapses in an earthquake and some people get hurt or even killed. Some might ask the question, “how do we make it so that no houses ever collapse in earthquakes?” The problem with this question is that we don’t want to have a society where no house ever falls down in an earthquake. The number of building restrictions, the amount of building materials and the enormous cost of making every building earthquake proof would be astronomical. Housing costs would skyrocket.
Obviously, we also don’t want a society where lots of houses fall down whenever there is an earthquake. That would mean that we are under-regulating and monitoring residential building, and that we aren’t valuing the safety of our citizens.
We should be aspiring, according to the economist, to not have too many or too few houses falling down in earthquakes. A healthy society will have the “right number of disasters.”
Similarly, if we had a society where no crime happened, we would have to be living in the most controlling, invasive police state the world has ever seen. Think about it, to have zero crime, there would have to be complete surveillance, the harshest of punishments, and dogmatic commitment to law and order by at least the vast majority of citizens. It sounds like a nightmare.
Saying that a society with no crime doesn’t make sense does not, of course, mean that we want crime. It also doesn’t mean we think crime is something we should ignore. It’s simply an acceptance of the idea that the tradeoff for letting people have freedom is dealing with the fallouts of personal freedom that we don’t necessarily like.
The basic premise here is that acting like disasters should never happen is a mistake. So is pretending disasters don’t matter. The balance, it seems, should come from asking ourselves: “do we have the right number of disasters?”
We want some houses to fall down in earthquakes because that means we haven’t gotten completely out of control with building costs and regulations, and we want some amount of crime to happen because that means people still have freedom.
Likewise, in our clinics, if no one ever gets angry about the price of services we probably aren’t charging enough to run a healthy practice. If no one ever fails to follow a set protocol, then I question whether people are actually thinking about the specific case in front of them. If no patient ever dies in surgery, then are we pushing ourselves to save as many lives as possible?
Things SHOULD go wrong in practice. They shouldn’t go wrong in great numbers, and the same thing certainly shouldn’t go wrong over and over. However, there absolutely must be disasters in a healthy practice. Here, just like in the media, asking what we can do to eliminate problems is generally the wrong approach. The right one is about asking ourselves “are we having the right number of disasters?”
