Tracey Brown, director of the United Kingdom science education charity Sense about Science, and Michael Hanlon, a London-based science journalist, begin their new book, Playing by the Rules, with a story: Two “safety sentinels” paddling a canoe in Lake Michigan warned swimmers to return to the “safe swimming depth.” One swimmer protested that a lack of rain had reduced the water level, and asked for permission to swim out where the safety sentinels were paddling. A sentinel denied the request because “one of our patrol canoes might run into you.”

Brown and Hanlon’s book is a string of such anecdotes, which produce reactions ranging from incredulity, to laughter, to exasperation. What motivated the authors is the reality that “many safety rules enjoy an authority they don’t deserve.” They argue against such rules on grounds that they:

  • are a waste of time and money; they look important but they just don’t work
  • have unintended consequences
  • are used as excuses to shirk responsibility
  • are covers for vested interests
  • distract from real danger and generate cynicism about the measures that do work

Safe skies? / Take air transportation. Naive airline passengers may learn the hard way that the United States’ Transportation Security Agency (TSA) prohibits boarding with “snow globes, bottles of aftershave, key rings, and a variety of artifacts and souvenirs whose plane-hijacking potential could never have been anticipated by their owners.” Britain’s equivalent of the TSA prohibits “toy guns, replicas, and imitation firearms capable of being mistaken for real weapons.” Despite that qualification, an official at Edinburgh airport prohibited a boy from carrying on a Nerf gun. In one of the more bizarre anecdotes, an official at Heathrow Airport stopped a passenger from boarding because his shirt had a picture of “a robot that was holding a gun.” The authors add, “Many airlines have a contract of carriage that includes refusing to carry people wearing obscene or offensive clothing.” However that seems insufficient to rationalize the official’s action. “It appears,” the authors suggest, “that the security guard merged the prohibition on toy guns and the rules about clothing.”

Many rules that aim to make air transportation safe and secure are questionable for various reasons. Brown and Hanlon ask, “Would it really be any easier to hijack an airliner armed with a nail file than with, say, the jagged edge of a smashed whiskey bottle that you acquired after clearing airport security?” Alternatively, don’t break the bottle. “Fashion a handkerchief into a wick,” instead, “and you could turn a bottle of whiskey into a highly effective Molotov cocktail.” In addition to imagining how terrorists might select tactics that circumvent security rules, Brown and Hanlon share strategic insights. They recommend allocating fewer resources to stop terrorists from boarding a plane and more resources toward intelligence. “Disrupting attacks much farther upstream, through foreign policy and intelligence work,” they state, “has a far greater track record of being effective, as the official report on 9/11 made clear.”

Although the unintended consequences of rules loom large, officials and the public tend to ignore them. For example, rules that aim to make air transportation more secure have significant costs in terms of money and time. Travelers substitute more risky driving for less risky flying. The authors cite risk analyst Gerd Gigerenzer’s calculation that the unintended consequences of additional rules, plus the public’s perception that flying became more dangerous after 9/11, resulted in about 1,600 additional lives lost on highways during 2002.

Think of the children / Foreseeing unintended consequences, or even identifying them after the fact, demands critical thinking. The authors write about Tim Gill, a British writer who specializes in children and risk. According to Brown and Hanlon, Gill reasons that installing “rubberized playground surfaces” in the United Kingdom prevented up to two children from dying over approximately 20 years at a cost of £350 million (about $450 million). Musing over whether each of the two lives saved was worth the £175 million spent to save them is difficult to do in public. Gill’s way of presenting cost–benefit analysis is easier for the public to accept: In the two decades that cushy ground cover prevented two children from dying on playgrounds, over a thousand children died in traffic accidents. Had that £350 million been spent on “traffic-calming measures,” it is likely that fewer deaths would have occurred. Yet another alternative, Gill points out, was to devote resources to building additional playgrounds. Children would have spent less time crossing streets on their ways to and from playgrounds farther from their homes, and fewer would have died. The reality, Brown and Hanlon spell out, is that the number of playgrounds decreased because of the more costly, higher playground safety standards.

Brown and Hanlon object to rules designed to avoid accountability. They share the story of a mother in Pittsburgh who took her son to a public pool. She wanted the boy to wear water wings because he has cerebral palsy. A lifeguard told her that water wings were prohibited. When asked to make an exception, the lifeguard was unwilling. Because the mother then defied the rule, police were called to the scene. A pool official claimed that the police intended to clarify the rules without evicting the mother.

Despite what appears to be an alarming escalation over pool rules, reason and discretion eventually prevailed. The mother persuaded pool officials to make an exception with the ultimate leverage: a doctor’s note. From Brown and Hanlon’s perspective, “That doctor’s note meant that the pool and the lifeguards had managed to shift their responsibility, and probably also their legal liability.” The mother deserves praise for determination and resolving the issue for her son’s benefit. How many children suffer when their parents back down in front of inflexible authorities? The doctor also deserves praise for taking responsibility. Brown and Hanlon condemn the pool officials for trying to evade responsibility. “The enforcement of safety measures was initially driven by a vague sense of liability,” in the authors’ view, “and then by the pool managers’ relief that responsibility now rested with someone else.”

In fairness to the pool officials, safety did concern them. Lifeguards question the effectiveness of water wings because they encourage a false sense of security. That point is legitimate. Floatation aids are not good substitutes for real swimming skills, and parents themselves might use floatation aids to shirk responsibility for instruction and supervision.

Some rules exist to serve “vested interests.” Recall the “Y2K” problem. Experts knew that some computers would not correctly recognize the change from 1999 to 2000. An anxious public prepared for chaos. Brown and Hanlon blame three groups for stoking the public’s anxiety: Information technology workers, such as programmers and network administrators, sold their services in return for “making the computer system ‘Y2K compliant.’ ” Politicians seized the “opportunity to be seen to be doing something important about an ideologically neutral problem that was manifestly not their fault.” This is a stark reminder to those who view bipartisanship as a good thing: politicians spend taxpayers’ money on bipartisan efforts with little opposition. The media rounds out the groups that benefited from Y2K mania. Writers could craft hair-raising tales of all that might go wrong because of Y2K, or they could ask probing questions to better estimate the real threat from Y2K. According to Brown and Hanlon, “virtually every reporter” chose the former. The authors report that global spending to avoid the Y2K problem ranged from a low of $300 billion to a high of $1.4 trillion. After the turn of the century, of course, normalcy prevailed, even in countries that did not take precautionary measures. The authors draw this “valuable lesson” from the episode: “Politicians need to learn a bit of skepticism, and they should start asking, ‘Cui bono?’ (Who benefits?)” Citizens should ponder that question too.

Asking for evidence / Rules are a means to achieve the goal of safety. Intuition suggests that more rules will make us safer. But sometimes that intuition is wrong. There is such a thing as too many rules, and an additional rule at some point reduces safety. Brown and Hanlon have a term for this: “rule fatigue.” Although individuals may flout rules on grounds of common sense or rebelliousness, according to the authors, sometimes individuals fail to comply “because the rules, however well meaning, can be so onerous and inconvenient that heeding them at all becomes impractical.”

Rest assured that we are safer, even if we do not sense that we are safer. A society with fewer rules is not necessarily riskier and, the authors lead us to believe, brings peace of mind.

Hans Monderman, an entrepreneurial street designer, theorized that fewer traffic rules would increase safety where he lived in Drachten, Netherlands. He convinced authorities to eliminate signs, signals, designated crosswalks, and more. Monderman’s insight shows that by keeping a speed limit and scrapping rules that aim to herd people and their vehicles through city streets, urbanites learn to “make eye contact” with each other. As a result, Drachten residents now experience “fewer accidents and fewer deaths.”

In order to combat insensible safety rules, Brown and Hanlon recommend that citizens “ask for evidence.” When frustrated by an authority figure parroting a seemingly senseless rule, try asking the following questions:

Why? On what basis does this rule exist? Where are the cases of people getting into trouble while doing this? Give us the statistics. Is this rule really making us safer? What is it costing us? Why do different countries have different rules?

Posing effective questions is a forte of the authors. Here are two more: “Have you considered the other effects [the rule] is having? Who really benefits from it?” Questioning the authorities will not quickly alter attitudes toward safety, but the payoff may be large. Lori LeVar Pierce of Columbus, Miss. let her son walk alone to soccer practice. The sight of her 10-year-old walking by himself alarmed someone enough to call 911. Although Pierce broke no law, a police officer scolded her and likened her parental discretion to “child endangerment.” Editorial writers likewise expressed their disagreement with her judgment for fear that the boy might have been abducted or hit by a car. Unintimidated by the criticism, Pierce publicized her experience and encouraged other parents to let their kids walk to their destinations and play outdoors. Her effort changed both attitudes and infrastructure: the same editorial page rescinded its earlier condemnation and Columbus planned new sidewalks and bike paths.

Brown and Hanlon generally cite sources, though not always. They inform us, for example, that SWAT-team operations have risen from 3,000 annually during the 1980s to 50,000 per year this decade. Their source is the Economist. But just one page after that, they inform us that “in 2012, armed law officers killed 587 people in the United States.” They cite no source for that. Nor do they, as they usually do, help us put that number into proper perspective by telling us numbers for other years and adjusting for population.

The authors do not oppose safety. “Sometimes we have found that a rule does make sense,” they admit. Consider driving. “There is strong evidence,” they proclaim, “that raising the minimum driving age saves lives.” Some of this evidence is international. Europeans start driving at a later age than Americans. Consequently, in Europe, “crash and death rates are generally far lower than in the United States.” The authors point out that the favorable European statistics could have multiple causes. Traffic is lighter in Europe, the higher price of gas there discourages teens from driving, and public mass transportation is a viable substitute. Other evidence that supports a lower minimum driving age comes from New Jersey. In that state the legal minimum driving age is 17 and newly licensed drivers are prohibited from driving in the wee hours of the morning. Based on research produced by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Brown and Hanlon report, “Several hundred young New Jersey citizens are walking around in good health today as a direct result of these measures.” Teenagers, unsurprisingly, oppose an increase in the legal minimum driving age. Politicians hesitate to initiate the change, perhaps because parents look forward to letting their teens drive themselves rather than chauffeuring them.

In sum, the authors aim to convince the reader that many unnecessary rules exist by laying down a barrage of anecdotes. They focus on telling good stories, one after another, without delving into technical details. Their straightforward advice, that we persistently ask for evidence, pervades the book.

Rest assured that we are safer, even if we do not sense that we are safer. Brown and Hanlon are optimistic that attitudes are changing because they see that when citizens demand evidence, officials act on it. A society with fewer rules is not necessarily riskier and, the authors lead us to believe, brings peace of mind.