The Norm Chronicles (2 page)

The unusual aim of this book is to see both at once. We hope to show people and their stories
and
the numbers, together. We set out to do this mainly to explore how these two perspectives compare, but along the way we found that this raised an awkward question: are the two faces of risk compatible? Can risk claim to be true to the numbers and to you at the same time? We will present both sides as we try to find out, but we will tell you our conclusion now.

It can’t. For people, probability doesn’t exist.

That’s an extraordinary claim from writers sometimes geeky enough to have two hoods on their anoraks. But with a little luck, the proof of it – and exactly what it means – will emerge through the clash of perspectives in this book.

The numbers and probabilities are all here. With them we show the chances of a variety of life’s tricks and traps: risks to children; risks of violence, accident and crime; dangers from sex, drugs, travel, diet, lifestyle; risks of natural disaster and more. We say how we know these risks, why sometimes we can’t know them and how they’ve changed, and we use the best methods we can find or invent to make them easy to grasp. In particular, we use a cunning little device called the MicroMort and a new one called the MicroLife, two friendly units of deadly risk that we think offer real insight. You will meet them soon enough. In this respect, the book is a new guide to life’s odds.

The human factor is here too. People don’t always do what the numbers seem to suggest they should. Some feel safe when they are in danger and in danger when they are safe, while the numbers may matter less to us than feelings of power or freedom, our values, our likes and dislikes and our emotions.

One reaction to the difference is to tell people they are stupid, and that if only they listened to the experts they’d live longer and sleep sounder. Another is to say that the experts may be right about the averages but that they clearly never had kids or an undiagnosed chest pain, or wanted to take a corner too fast.

Either way, the human factor can’t be ignored. To show it, we use
a technique that is, well, risky: we combine fact with fiction, numbers with stories. Why write a book that’s part numbers and part stories? Because that is how people see risk – through both stories and numbers.

Each has its virtues and shortcomings. Numbers tell us the odds. Stories are how we often convey the feelings and values that numbers cannot, feelings and values that might in turn distort our perception of the odds. Stories impose order, but often artificially – beginnings, middles and ends, all tied neatly together (too neatly?) with cause and effect. Numbers give us probabilities, which often don’t claim to know the precise causes and effects of how one thing leads to another but simply show us how it all adds up into a tally of life and death. To understand how these perspectives play out, shouldn’t we see them together? To be true to them, shouldn’t we try to let each speak on its own terms?
*

Steven Pinker wrote in
The Blank Slate
:

Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother? If my hapless older brother got no respect in the family, are there circumstances that might lead him to betray me? […] What’s the worst that could happen if I had an affair to spice up my boring life as the wife of a country doctor? […] The answers are to be found in any bookstore or any video store.

So we created some characters. First, Norm, the one who saw the blue
hold-all on the tube and tried to compute the optimal, proportionate reaction: our hero. Something or someone is out to get Norm, though he’s done nothing wrong. He’s just an average guy (the clue is in the name), looking for a safe path through life. He’s so average that even his attempts to stand out are average, the sort of guy who feels moderately about Marmite.

But life has its own plans for Norm: maybe a car crash, a fatal dose of bird flu, a mugger’s knife or meteorite, a nuclear meltdown or his own spreading waistline. Somewhere, an assassin waits.

Still, he tries. Risk is calculable, he says, and with reason as his guide and a sense of proportion he can steer a true course. His habits are ordinary, he likes a nice cup of tea but not too many, wears M&S trousers and invites little risk from hot passion or daring. Even so, someone or something wants him dead. Norm’s entire, blameless life is a story of mortal danger, as to some extent is yours, and ours.

Prudence (another clue), the one who panicked on the tube, treads warily, all anxious glances. Every stranger’s footstep could be following her. The numbers hardly matter, and one scary story is all that fear needs to set fire to her imagination.
*

Finally, there are the Kevlin brothers, Kelvin, Kevin and Kieran, chancers and risk-junkies who fly by the seat of their pants and might, just for the hell of it, tell you exactly where to shove your reasons and probabilities.

Side by side, chapter by chapter, numbers and stories. We had planned to let the clash of perspectives stand on its own without comment. In the end we went a step further to bring out the differences. So within the non-fiction we also explore the psychology of risk perception. This is where numbers and stories meet, and often disagree.

All of which leaves us with two competing world-views. What happens when they collide? A fight, often as not, in which advocates of one approach accuse the others of being irrational and the others reply that the first lot are unfeeling.

These conflicts are elemental. Within people’s attitudes to risk lurk
many of life’s deepest tensions. Pick your side: art versus science, feeling versus reason, words versus numbers, perception versus objectivity, stories versus stats, instinct versus analysis, the particular versus the abstract, romanticism versus classicism, red trainers versus brown Hush Puppies: in short, the eternal row between fundamentally different versions of truth and experience. It is easy to set up camp in one or the other and never look outside.

Even if you think you don’t take these sides, and certainly not so crudely, you might take them over danger. It touches something deep in our attitude to life; it helps define what kind of people we are. Sometimes we embody both sides and are torn by contrary impulses as the struggles between different world-views – sometimes the numbers, sometimes the stories and emotions – ebb and flow as we try to work out how to live. Beside such weighty stuff, the fact that danger might also strangle us with a blind cord, poison us with salmonella or blow us to bits seems almost by the way.

Here’s a quick illustration.

It’s a summer’s day. You are walking down the High Street licking a vanilla Cornetto when a red number 42 double-decker bus thumps onto the pavement, whacks your ice cream from your hand and rips into Tesco Metro in a blizzard of glass and twisted metal, leaving you shocked – but unharmed. What are the chances?

In no instance are the exact facts of an accident predictable with anything like certainty. True, we know, to take another example, that leaning out from a ladder to paint the irritating bit in the far corner is asking for it. We can see what’s coming, we say. But can we? Reliably? Of course not. Sometimes it comes, and sometimes it doesn’t. Chance always plays a part.

Similarly, a bus crash might be mechanical failure or driver error; it might depend on the timetable, the road, the traffic, on the weather, on you, on the length of the queue for the ice cream, which in turn depends on everyone in it, or it might depend on every one of those things – in all, an infinitely intricate and improbable spaghetti of causes, events and people. You, reading this
word
in this book at whatever time and place you happen to be, took an absurd quantity of cause and effect – right
back to the beginning of everything, if you must. Which is another way of saying that no one knows the future. Life is too complicated.

And yet you might not be all that surprised if a crash like that really happened – if not to you, then to someone. We know for sure that countless things – unlikely or not – will happen somewhere to someone, as they must. More than that, we know that they will often happen in strange and predictable patterns. Fatal falls from ladders among the approximately 21 million men in England and Wales in the five years to 2010 were uncannily consistent, numbering 42, 54, 56, 53 and 47. For all the chance particulars that apply to any individual among 21 million individuals, the numbers are amazingly, fiendishly stable – unlike the ladders.
³
Some calculating God, painting fate by numbers up in the clouds, orders another splash of red: ‘Hey, you in the dungarees, we’re short this month.’

We know there will be accidents and incidents, and we often know what kind and how many – to the extent that we can predict pretty well how many people will be murdered in London by 28 July next year, and even how many murders there are likely to be on one day (which we did – in
Chapter 22
, on crime). Up close, life can appear chaotic. Every murder is unique and unpredictable, every fall and crash laced with infinite chance. Seen from above, people often move in patterns with spooky regularity.

This is the great puzzle about danger: that a million stories describe it, feelings inform it, and a million occasions conspire for or against every incident – and yet there are a relatively consistent number. Every cancer begins with a freak cellular mutation, and yet a fairly steady one-third of people will get one.
*
It is one of life’s odder facts, this order amid disorder, the natural and spontaneous emergence of shape – persistent and predictable – even as everyone does their own thing.

So, from above, the course of human destiny is often clear. To
individuals below, it is a maze of stories. It is as if there are two forces at the same time: one at the big scale pulling towards certainty, the other pushing individuals towards uncertainty. There’s a word to describe this balance between the patterns of populations and the stumbling of a single soul, a word first used in its modern sense only a few hundred years ago: probability.

Probability – at least one version – begins with counting past events, such as ‘20 per cent of men who died in recent years, died from heart disease’. It then uses this to predict a pattern. ‘About 20 per cent will die from heart disease in future.’ But then it goes a step further: from that general prediction it gives odds for what will happen to individuals. ‘The risk or chance that the average person will eventually die from heart disease is therefore also 20 per cent, or one in five for a man, about 14 per cent or one in seven for a woman.’ Thus it moves from past to future, from the mass to the individual.

Probability is magical, a brilliant concept. It yokes together our two world-views, the two faces of risk: the orderly view of whole populations seen in numbers from above and the sometimes lonely view in the maze of stories below. It embraces all of us individuals in aggregated data. Today people use probability to help make decisions about everything from the weather to money or the chance of being burgled, the risks from mobile phones, sausages or tsunamis. It touches our hopes and fears at every turn. The news is full of it, and no wonder – it seems to offer a hold on the future. Which is why it is that little bit inconvenient that it doesn’t exist.

Norm’s life-course shapes the order of the risks here, as we discover how well numbers can guide him, from beginning to end. As for which to include, we chose whatever seemed interesting and personal. There’s little, for example, about risks in business – or Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), as it is known – about which more than enough is said already.

To add to our ambitions, we hope that the different perspectives here create a book that everyone from all sides of the argument can read and enjoy on the path to mutual understanding. Although by trying to reach everyone, it has occurred to us that we might reach no one. It’s a risk.

Finally, a couple of hazard warnings: first, people are learning more
about risks all the time, so it won’t be long before there’ll be new data. This fact is not just awkward, it’s relevant to the argument. What kind of trust can you place in numbers that don’t stand still?

Second, in places this is almost a mini-encyclopaedia of hazards. There are a lot of numbers here, and they are more fun to dip into than read in one go. Even so, the statistical evidence could go on and on, and we welcome readers’ arguments about all those extra stats that we left out. We had to stop somewhere.

So the scene is set. Stories will be pitched beside stats, reason will tangle with feeling and impulse, belief will quarrel with evidence. We looked hard at the data and threw them at an imagined life where objectivity doesn’t always get a look in, let alone prevail, sometimes in spite of Norm’s best efforts. In short, we have brought together as many oppositions around risk as we felt we could in one book and in the process hope to start – or restart – reflection on that mighty clash of world-views. There’s also something or other going on in a sub-plot about asteroids and the end of the world.

We’ve already stated our own conclusion about how all this ends. But what that conclusion means, whether the argument stands, how or whether the two sides can be reconciled, is ultimately, of course, for you to judge, as you also explore where you stand on danger, if you dare.

1
THE BEGINNING

H
AD HE NOT POURED GIN
in the fish tank in a stupid reflex flick of the wrist when he tasted it – because the thing is, he hated gin – the whole story would never even have begun.

It wouldn’t have happened if the fish hadn’t died, either. Or if he hadn’t felt bad for crashing the party in the first place and twigged that the other girl knew who he was and might tell on him. But for all that, he probably never would have been standing there the next day saying sorry.