Freedomain Radio

The following is from Discover Magazine:  Link:  http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/urban-unplanning

After years of watching engineers model traffic flow with advanced physics to alleviate jams, a team of urban planners called Shared Space have adopted a simple solution based on a zoological concept known as the risk compensation effect. Basically, it means that animals tend to adjust their behavior to compensate for perceived risk. Applied to traffic, the idea is that people will drive more cautiously if they believe they are in a dangerous environment. The effect may explain why taxi drivers with antilock brakes drive faster or why wearers of bicycle helmets get struck down more.

The Shared Space team believes that signs, signals, and the traffic rules they represent make the roads more dangerous because they lead us to believe we are safe. “Conventional highway engineering operates on the dumb molecule theory of human behavior,” says John Adams, emeritus professor of geography at University College London and a Shared Space advocate. “And the human molecule is responsive to what it sees about it.”

Today five American cities are trying the approach, and seven major pilot projects are in the works across Europe. The town of Drachten in the Netherlands has only 2 of its 18 traffic lights left. Since the program began in 2004, accident rates at the town’s main intersection have dropped to only one per year from a previous nine-year average of just over eight, congestion has fallen by 20 percent, and journey times have been reduced by 10 minutes. Stripping London’s busy High Street Kensington shopping area of some of its signage, lights, and pedestrian barriers reduced traffic-related casualties by 43 percent. After the English town of Seend went bare, it witnessed a 5 percent fall in average speed, and accidents dropped by a third.

Nathan (McKaskle) did an article on roads and risk a while back.

I think this concept of risk compensation is an important one for anarchism. It's not integral to the argument from morality, of course, but thinking about it it seems to me that this "dumb molecule" theory of human behavior underlies a lot of the arguments from effect in support of statism, and for ideas within the paradigm of statism. Arguments for gun control, for instance, routinely incorporate the assumption that normal, everyday conflicts will escalate rapidly if people are allowed to have guns because people won't modulate their behavior according to the risk, whereas opponents of gun control often claim people will be more polite and society will be safer the more people have guns. It boils down to the dumb molecule theory versus the responsive molecule theory in the end, and I think in many other cases the libertarian position consistently follows the responsive molecule theory whereas statist arguments follow the dumb molecule theory (for instance, price controls, deposit insurance, industry bailouts, deficit spending) and it's not at all limited to how people assess risk.

 I agree completely.

I think that the "dumb molecule" concept is related to the "all other things will remain equal" fallacy.  For example if you take away X government product/service the society will just lack X, and nothing will arrise to take it's place.  It's like we're all just stick figures.

And connecting all of these with the Broken Window Fallacy and the Minimum Wage Fallacy, and other statist assumptions about the world...I just comes down to not understand people and how they interact in a complex system.

When a statist plans, he's planning for lego people.

When an anarchist shuns planning, he's recogonizing the infinitey complex nature of human interteractions.

You got a link to that story (or a story about this concept from another source)?

I've put the link into the original post.