Are accidental deaths simply about an unlucky person who made a mistake, or who was in the wrong place at the wrong time? Jesse Singer contends there is far more to the story. Real responsibility for such deaths lies with those who can, and fail to, prevent them. Singer makes a strong case for fixing the built environment that is so conducive to fatal mistakes, as opposed to trying to fix individuals who make them.
There are 173,000 accidental deaths a year in the USA. They are mainly ignored -- even though
57 times more Americans die in accidents than died on 9/11. The accidental death rate declined after WWII until 1992. Since then, that rate has risen by 50 percent, even as the overall death rate declined, prior to the pandemic.
The US is an outlier in accidental deaths. Americans are significantly more likely to suffer accidental deaths than Europeans, Japanese, Canadians or Aussies. Norway was second highest in accidental death rate in 2008, yet Americans were 40 percent more likely to die from accidents than Norweigans. And more than three times more likely to die in a traffic accident here than in Japan.
The word "accident" carries unfortunate connotations, according to the author of There Are No Accidents. The word “accident” erroneously implies that injuries occur by chance and cannot be foreseen or prevented. In addition, calling a tragedy an accident tends to absolve
powerful people who are responsible for dangerous conditions, and who allow accidents to happen again and again.
We human beings are eager to cast blame, but reluctant to accept it. When something bad happens, we look for a scapegoat. When we blame victims for their accidents, we are distracted from seeking ways to prevent future accidents. Punishing the distracted driver does not make a dangerous intersection safer. Blaming is also a reason we don't spend more to prevent accidents. After all, if accidents are the fault of careless, reckless or drunk individuals, they deserve what they get.
Powerful people responsible for dangerous conditions would rather find a low-level scapegoat to blame than to admit their own
nonfeasance. Blaming a negligent driver protects those who could have, but did not, remove risky conditions.
Singer sums up his point: "The chief consequence of blame is the prevention of prevention. In finding fault with a person, the case of any given accident appears closed. Putting aside blame is the first step to changing the environments that put us at risk."
Our behavior is influenced by our environment. When the environment contains hazardous conditions, then human error leads to bad outcomes. Error is involved in almost all fatal accidents; so are dangerous conditions.
Should we fix people who make mistakes, or should we fix the environment conducive to deadly mistakes? Consider a case study.
Aspirin poisoning of children was once a common occurence. One reaction was to blame careless parents for leaving aspirin bottles where toddlers could get them. A related approach was to run educational campaigns reminding parents to be more careful. A third aproach proved the most effective: The Poison Prevention Packaging Act enacted in 1970 regulates pill containers, requiring them to be childproof. The number of children accidentally killed subsequently declined by 75 percent. In other words, the environment was made safer, and child safety didn't depend upon parents always remembering to hide the aspirin.
Singer's thesis is this: "Mistakes are inevitable, people are not perfectible, and the only answer to the accident problem starts with setting aside blame for human error. Accidents happen when errors occur under dangerous conditions, but you can create conditions that anticipate errors and make those mistakes less of a life-or-death equation. Or you can focus all your energy on errors, and let the same accidents happen again and again."
In short, fix people or fix the built
environment (dangerous
conditions). Since people aren't perfectible, design workplaces to anticipate mistakes, reduce them, and make them less harmful.
Whether we choose blame or redesign determines whether the same accidents happen again.
Singer takes an instructive look at two previous periods of significant increases in fatal accidents: early in the Industrial Revolution and in the first half century after the invention of the automobile. "From the Industrial Revolution onward, powerful corporate interests insisted that fallible people were the souce of all accidents."
The railroad industry is a case in point. There were 11,000 workers killed in coupling accidents in 1892 alone. The industry blamed the victims for being careless or drunk. In 1893, Congress passed a law requiring air brakes on all trains and the use of automatic couplers, so workers could connect or disconnect two railcars without standing between them. The number of coupling deaths soon deaths plummeted.
In 1908, traffic accidents killed 751 Americans. By 1935, traffic fatalities had grown more than 50 times —37,000 Americans dead and 105,000 permanently disabled.
Both the industrialists and auto executives embraced the bad apple explanation: it was careless workers and reckless drivers who were to blame. It was individual mistakes, not dangerous conditions, that caused soaring deaths and injuries.
The auto industry blamed speeders and "jaywalkers," a term that the industry converted for its purposes. In 1927, Walter Chrysler wrote that the only solution to pedestrian deaths was to educate children.
While blaming the jaywalkers for getting killed, the auto industry opposed speed governors on vehicles in urban areas, even though the likelihood of death after being struck by a vehicle rises geometrically with speed. They refused to admit the inherent danger of vehicles capable of high speeds on urban streets.
Blaming the victim was the same response that industrialists had to increasing deaths and injuries on the job. Injured workers werw supposedly accident-prone, careless, or drunk. Employers much preferred to focus on the role of worker errors in accidents rather than on unsafe working conditions. It's not the speed of the assembly line that is to blame -- it's always wayward workers.
The problem is that maximizing profits is a higher priority than reducing injuries. It wasn't until states adopted worker comp laws that the number of serious industrial accidents plummeted. That's because accidents then affected the bottom line.
As early as 1953, research demonstrated that drivers were injured or killed by pointed knobs, dashboards without padding, steering columns that could not collapse on impact, and no safety belts. Though the auto industry knew that safety belts, airbags, and padded interiors save lives, executives did not voluntarily put them in vehicles, and they resisted and delayed federal regs to do so.
Every industry has the same playbook. For many years, Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, blamed overdose deaths on the victims -- not on the addictive opiod Purdue was selling as nonaddictive. Abusers are "reckless criminals," wrote Richard Sackler in 2001.
Power is a key factor in accidents. Some people have the power to mitigate risky conditions, but refuse to do it. Americans who are poor and black or brown are much more likely to die in accidents. "Wealth is a risk insulator and poverty is a risk amplifier."
Another example of blaming victims instead of unsafe conditions involves the 50 percent jump in pedestrian deaths since 2009. It's not that pedestrians are 50 percent more careless, it's that vehicles are bigger and faster. Yet Federal safety agencies focus on educating pedestrians, not on testing and rating vehicles for harm to pedestrians, the way Japan and Europe do.
In rejecting blame, Singer is also critical of stricter law enforcement as a way to reduce accidents. While enforcement has limitations and abuses, Singer goes too far in eschewing it. The dramatic increase in safety-belt use in the 1980s and 90s is evidence that high-profile enforcement, combined with education, can change behavior and prevent injuries and deaths. Similar results occurred with DUI and the use of child safety seats.
More police patrols, however, are neither a panacea nor a substitute for fixing risky conditions conducive to fatal mishaps.
Most nonfiction that people read basically reinforces their current beliefs. Once in a while, however, a book elicits a sharp shift in how the reader sees reality. There Are No Accidents is a prime example. Most readers will agree that "mistakes are inevitable, but premature death is not." Readers
will likely support redesigning conditions to allow less harm when inevitable mistakes are made, as well as to resist the kneejerk urge to blame accidents on some careless victim.
Given that Americans are far more likely to die from accidents than our counterparts in other affluent nations, we should change our approach and "prevent the preventable." Design systems to minimize the harm from inevitable mistakes. When tragedy is predictable, we should seek to avoid it. -30-
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my review of There Are No Accidents
I have had a career in air traffic control, am a pilot and an avid cyclist, and I thought I understood accidents. I've avoided use of the word, accident. This book took me further afield and left me with a bigger and more socialized understanding of the errors we experience, even though some people know better.It is superb book of breathtaking brilliance. The author, Jessie Singer, walks us through the statistics of industrial death, automotive death, fire deaths, hospital error deaths, gun deaths, and drug deaths. She manages a very broad sweep with effective, accessible writing and provides sources and narrative.She describes both individual risks and the risks of dangerous conditions. The book talks about how accident victims are much more likely to be oppressed by racism, income, socio-economic status, gender, and the degree to which they're Othered.The book discusses the introduction of Worker's Comp and how corporate interest in avoiding accidents really started when they bore partial financial responsibility for killed and maimed workers.She goes back to the Industrial Revolution and examines factory deaths, railway deaths, and traffic deaths. She describes how accidents predictably happen when there's an emphasis on speed, on untrained employees, and with non-unionized workforces.She explains that public use of the word 'accident' is exculpatory, offers kindess in grief, yet diminished corporate or institutional responsibility. The term also focuses attention on the performance of individials and not on the designed and cost-justified environment.The book focuses on the roles of power, forgiveness, 'accidents', as opposed to the oppressed, the blamed, and the criminalization of actions.She reviews the history of accident theory and explores the relatively new field of 'normal accidents', caused by multiple complex systems interacting, in unanticipated ways, with exploding complexity. And these interacting systems are economic, social, and racial.The author says there are two types of accidents: rare, infrequent, large and catastrophic such as a collision between two 747s; and the common, frequent, small accidents like car crashes which individually take only a few lives, but aggregate to claim 40,000 Americans each year.The books explores the role of stigma, blame, and othering in response to accidents, and the importance of who tells the story of what transpired. She delves into restorative justive rather than tort justice and calls for empathy in understanding why people made the choices they have made.Singer writes, Everything we call an Accident is predictable and preventable. She makes the case quite convincingly.
Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2023
Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2022
I have had a career in air traffic control, am a pilot and an avid cyclist, and I thought I understood accidents. I've avoided use of the word, accident. This book took me further afield and left me with a bigger and more socialized understanding of the errors we experience, even though some people know better.
It is superb book of breathtaking brilliance. The author, Jessie Singer, walks us through the statistics of industrial death, automotive death, fire deaths, hospital error deaths, gun deaths, and drug deaths. She manages a very broad sweep with effective, accessible writing and provides sources and narrative.
She describes both individual risks and the risks of dangerous conditions. The book talks about how accident victims are much more likely to be oppressed by racism, income, socio-economic status, gender, and the degree to which they're Othered.
The book discusses the introduction of Worker's Comp and how corporate interest in avoiding accidents really started when they bore partial financial responsibility for killed and maimed workers.
She goes back to the Industrial Revolution and examines factory deaths, railway deaths, and traffic deaths. She describes how accidents predictably happen when there's an emphasis on speed, on untrained employees, and with non-unionized workforces.
She explains that public use of the word 'accident' is exculpatory, offers kindess in grief, yet diminished corporate or institutional responsibility. The term also focuses attention on the performance of individials and not on the designed and cost-justified environment.
The book focuses on the roles of power, forgiveness, 'accidents', as opposed to the oppressed, the blamed, and the criminalization of actions.
She reviews the history of accident theory and explores the relatively new field of 'normal accidents', caused by multiple complex systems interacting, in unanticipated ways, with exploding complexity. And these interacting systems are economic, social, and racial.
The author says there are two types of accidents: rare, infrequent, large and catastrophic such as a collision between two 747s; and the common, frequent, small accidents like car crashes which individually take only a few lives, but aggregate to claim 40,000 Americans each year.
The books explores the role of stigma, blame, and othering in response to accidents, and the importance of who tells the story of what transpired. She delves into restorative justive rather than tort justice and calls for empathy in understanding why people made the choices they have made.
Singer writes, Everything we call an Accident is predictable and preventable. She makes the case quite convincingly.
It is superb book of breathtaking brilliance. The author, Jessie Singer, walks us through the statistics of industrial death, automotive death, fire deaths, hospital error deaths, gun deaths, and drug deaths. She manages a very broad sweep with effective, accessible writing and provides sources and narrative.
She describes both individual risks and the risks of dangerous conditions. The book talks about how accident victims are much more likely to be oppressed by racism, income, socio-economic status, gender, and the degree to which they're Othered.
The book discusses the introduction of Worker's Comp and how corporate interest in avoiding accidents really started when they bore partial financial responsibility for killed and maimed workers.
She goes back to the Industrial Revolution and examines factory deaths, railway deaths, and traffic deaths. She describes how accidents predictably happen when there's an emphasis on speed, on untrained employees, and with non-unionized workforces.
She explains that public use of the word 'accident' is exculpatory, offers kindess in grief, yet diminished corporate or institutional responsibility. The term also focuses attention on the performance of individials and not on the designed and cost-justified environment.
The book focuses on the roles of power, forgiveness, 'accidents', as opposed to the oppressed, the blamed, and the criminalization of actions.
She reviews the history of accident theory and explores the relatively new field of 'normal accidents', caused by multiple complex systems interacting, in unanticipated ways, with exploding complexity. And these interacting systems are economic, social, and racial.
The author says there are two types of accidents: rare, infrequent, large and catastrophic such as a collision between two 747s; and the common, frequent, small accidents like car crashes which individually take only a few lives, but aggregate to claim 40,000 Americans each year.
The books explores the role of stigma, blame, and othering in response to accidents, and the importance of who tells the story of what transpired. She delves into restorative justive rather than tort justice and calls for empathy in understanding why people made the choices they have made.
Singer writes, Everything we call an Accident is predictable and preventable. She makes the case quite convincingly.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2023
Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2022
