Rational Risk Policy.

• Author: FORMAINI, ROBERT L.
• Position: Review

Rational Risk Policy By W. Kip Viscusi New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. 138. $21.95 cloth.

Most Americans have probably heard or read about regulations whose costs far exceed any discernible, or even optimistically predicted, benefits. W. Kip Viscusi's Rational Risk Policy is a compilation of lectures given by the author at Lund University in Sweden during 1996, most of which shed light on the elusive benefits that regulation advocates promise but regulation often fails to deliver.

Viscusi is well known as a leading academic writer in the field of risk assessment, and the book is aimed squarely at academics. It is not easy to read, but it is well worth the effort. Some of Viscusi's previous books along similar lines are Risk By Choice: Regulating Health and Safety in the Workplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); (with Wesley A. Magat) Learning about Risk: Consumer and Worker Responses to Hazard Information (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Fatal Trade-offs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). He has even produced a tome on the risky choice to smoke cigarettes, should readers wish to absorb the risk tables for that activity. But his larger points about risk and policy, no matter how communicated, are well worth the effort required to understand them.

Viscusi begins the Lund lectures by explaining that people tend to place too much emphasis on small risks and not enough on larger ones. Thus, they are terrified by traces of insecticide on their food, even though they stand little chance of being harmed, but they tend to ignore or take for granted some much greater dangers. This attitude, Viscusi claims, leads to the overestimation of highly publicized risks, which creates "not only the potential for alarmist public responses to risk, but also possible pressures on government behavior, particularly when these risks are novel" (p. 24).

Viscusi deals with a world in which one chance in millions governs policy responses, even though no one can really comprehend risk that small. Nonetheless, as technology makes it possible to measure substances in parts per trillion, alarm will not lag far behind when the public learns that various "poisons" are present in food, water, or air. What is appropriate social policy for such a world? How can people be reassured by policy when, each day, very scientific-looking and -sounding individuals attempt to...