> 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

> 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.