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>Also known as the Precautionary Approach or Precautionary Action, the Precautionary Principle is a concept best summed up by the proverb “better safe than sorr

>Also known as the Precautionary Approach or Precautionary Action, the Precautionary Principle is a concept best summed up by the proverb “better safe than sorry” or the medical maxim to “first do no harm.” Also the folklore, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". PP is best applied to situations with the potential, not necessarily the guarantee, of widespread systemic harm and/or catastrophic failure from which recovery is exceedingly technically difficult, prohibitively expensive, or downright impossible - for example, nuclear war, climate catastrophe, global financial crisis, global pandemic of a novel and not-well-understood pathogen. The "not necessarily the guarantee" is the hard part. Human judgement tends to be biased toward discounting both the odds and impact of occurrence of systemic risks that have less than 100% chance of occurring, but significant impact if they do occur. Especially when there are immediate costs to avoiding them, or immediate financial benefit to avoiding/externalizing them. Thus it is often politically difficult for society and political leaders to apply PP to any particular systemic risk, until after it's happened and the odds of occurrence become 100% and the impact widely felt. Both the Great Depression and the Global/Great Financial Crisis are examples of this - prevention measures put in place after the fact. COVID19 as well.

dandelany 5y ago
Well said. Perhaps the proverb should be “an ounce of prevention is worth a one-sixteenth chance of a pound of cure” :)
pdonis 5y ago
> Also the folklore, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". No, that's not what the precautionary principle says. The precautionary principle says that you should not take actions that could have negative consequences, even if you're not sure those negative consequences will happen. Prevention is an action. If prevention has no possible negative consequences, then the precautionary principle is irrelevant to it. If prevention does have possible negative consequences (and most "prevention" actions do), then the precautionary principle says you should not do it. In other words, the precautionary principle is not the same as risk-benefit analysis, which weighs the risks and benefits of various possible choices, in order to make the choice that has the best risk-benefit balance all things considered. The proverb you cite, however, is about risk-benefit analysis: it is basically telling you that, if you do such an analysis, you will find that the risk-benefit tradeoff of prevention (doing something in advance to prevent a bad thing from happening, and paying the costs of prevention up front) is very often much better than the risk-benefit tradeoff of cure (waiting for the bad thing to happen and then paying the costs of fixing it if it does happen). Btw, this means that the article, to the extent it talks about weighing risks vs. benefits of various choices (which is quite a bit), is not about the precautionary principle, despite its title.

dandelany 5y ago

Well said. Perhaps the proverb should be “an ounce of prevention is worth a one-sixteenth chance of a pound of cure” :)

pdonis 5y ago

> Also the folklore, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". No, that's not what the precautionary principle says. The precautionary principle says that you should not take actions that could have negative consequences, even if you're not sure those negative consequences will happen. Prevention is an action. If prevention has no possible negative consequences, then the precautionary principle is irrelevant to it. If prevention does have possible negative consequences (and most "prevention" actions do), then the precautionary principle says you should not do it. In other words, the precautionary principle is not the same as risk-benefit analysis, which weighs the risks and benefits of various possible choices, in order to make the choice that has the best risk-benefit balance all things considered. The proverb you cite, however, is about risk-benefit analysis: it is basically telling you that, if you do such an analysis, you will find that the risk-benefit tradeoff of prevention (doing something in advance to prevent a bad thing from happening, and paying the costs of prevention up front) is very often much better than the risk-benefit tradeoff of cure (waiting for the bad thing to happen and then paying the costs of fixing it if it does happen). Btw, this means that the article, to the extent it talks about weighing risks vs. benefits of various choices (which is quite a bit), is not about the precautionary principle, despite its title.