New critique of risk assessment

New critique of risk assessment

Lawrence Solum recommends downloading and reading "Against 'Individual Risk': A Sympathetic Critique of Risk Assessment " by Mattew Adler. The abstract describes the paper as:

"...In short, the Article provides a wide ranging, critical analysis of contemporary risk assessment and risk regulation. The perspective offered here is that of the sympathetic critic. Risk assessment itself - the enterprise of quantifying health and safety threats - represents a great leap forward for public rationality, and should not be abandoned. Rather, the current conception of risk assessment needs to be reworked. Risk needs to be seen in Bayesian rather than frequentist terms. And regulatory choice procedures must be focused, centrally, on the total numbers of the persons exposed to toxins, radiation, pathogens, or other health or safety hazards - not merely the risk that some particular person (whatever her place in the exposure distribution) incurs."

Solum says:

"...Adler's work continues to advance the ball on a set of issues that is absolutely crucial in both theory and practice of administrative law. Here's how I think about it. "Cost-benefit analysis" and its methodological cousins are here to stay. Given that fact, it is crucially important that this methodology be made as supple as possible. In recent work, Adler has focused on the idea for risk...