Free The Norm Chronicles by Michael Blastland

Statistics (ONS) says 137 of them died from all causes. Seven died in transport accidents. One was a pedestrian. *
    This is an average risk of less than 1 MicroMort per year. That is, 1/365th of the average daily risk of acute death for a UK adult. As we show below, more children die each year strangled by cords on window blinds.
    Put aside arguments about parental responsibility and freedom. Concentrate on the risk – and answer an awkward question: which are most compelling, the basement-level mortality statistics, or the heightened fears of Lincolnshire County Council?
Figure 7: Children killed and seriously injured on the roads, UK, 1979–2010 3

    If you back the council, it may be because you feel the pull of what’s called the ‘asymmetry of regret’, better known as ‘How would you feel if …?’ How would you feel if you took your child to and from the bus stop every day and your worst regret was that you wasted a few minutes to prevent an accident that was probably never going to happen anyway? Not entirely happy maybe, but in the scheme of things the time and effort are no big loss. Next, how would you feel if you did not give up those few minutes, then one sunny morning over toast and marmalade you heard the squeal of brakes?
    Choosing what to do in life by trying to minimise what you might most regret is known in decision theory, 4 naturally enough, as minimax regret. Most decisions are here and now. Imagined future regret is a tortured complication. It’s more than the difference between short-and long-term self-interest. It twists the knife with potential guilt and blame, imagines this as if experienced with hindsight, then makes that anticipated-retrospective feeling our main motive, if you follow. It is a roundabout way of deciding what to do which people calculate in a blink. But at its most tyrannical, mini-max regret makes us slaves of nightmares. A bad ending foreseen or imagined comes to justify themost drastic avoidance. Does it also save lives? Thomas Hardy said that fear is the mother of foresight. In the TV series The Simpsons ‘just think of the children’ is a joke that could be about mini-max regret. For some, it is a compulsion.
Figure 8: MicroMorts per year for accidental injury, including transport, by age, in 2010, England and Wales

    Equal to crude rates of death per 1 million population. Not including ‘hospital misadventure’, which we discuss in Chapter 23 .
    For people who feel this way, it is the potential ‘what if?’ – maybe the maximum imaginable ‘what if?’ – that they will do just about anything to minimise – that weighs far more than any odds. So it’s no surprise that probabilities sometimes cut no ice, no matter how low, especially if the emotional stakes include children.
    Still, let’s remind ourselves – again – that the probabilities are lower than ever. As with mortality overall and also with murder, children are far less likely than any other age group to suffer accidental death. *
    Old age, not childhood, is by far the most dangerous time for what the ONS calls avoidable accidental death. 5 The accident rate for over-85sis so high that it would smash two and a half times through the top of this graph. We couldn’t fit it on without making the risk to most other age groups vanish into the axis. For women, the clear trend is that death from accidental injury becomes more likely with age. For men, the trend is not quite so smooth, bucked in early adulthood and middle age by a taste for thrills that are bound to cause a few casualties.
    If we highlight in these overall figures just the accidental deaths caused by transport, it’s a slightly different story for young people. The old are still among the most vulnerable, but the 15–19s are now up among the highest.
Figure 9: MicroMorts per year by age for transport accidents in England and Wales, 2010, equal to crude rates of death per 1 million population

    Note the different scale to Figure 8