I.O.U. by Lanchester John

Author:Lanchester, John [Lanchester, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781439169841
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-01-05T08:00:00+00:00

FIVE

THE MISTAKE

And yet the financial industry could still have got away with it. All the things described up until now could have been survived, and the resulting chaos avoided, if it hadn’t been for a single mistake. It was the mistake which underpinned all the other mistakes and errors of judgment; it was the mistake which took the global economic system up to the edge of the abyss, and although in some senses it was not a single mistake, because it was made by lots of people in lots of different places on many varied occasions, in another way it was the same mistake everywhere. That mistake can be summed up in a single word: risk. The bankers made inaccurate calculations about the mathematics of risk. That in essence was the mistake which destroyed some banks, forced others into public ownership, put taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars, and brought the world financial system to a juddering, panicky standstill. It led directly to the slowdown currently dominating every economy in the world.

I’m willing to make a bet. This is it: that somewhere near you, wherever and whoever you are, there is a killer. A killer you’ve never noticed as a killer; a killer you’ve never thought about as a real danger to you. I’m not talking about an invisible killer, like a virus or bacteria; I’m not talking about an obvious killer, like the idiot in the 4×4 roaring down the road outside or the mugger lurking by the broken streetlight, I’m talking about a killer who is plainly visible, whom you see every day, whom you’ve known your whole life, and to whom you never give a second’s thought. This killer kills more than a thousand men and women in the United Kingdom every year, year in and year out, yet you’ve never heard a word about the dangers it represents. Bear in mind that cars and road accidents—that’s drivers, passengers, pedestrians, cyclists, everybody—come to a total of less than 3,000 deaths a year. This killer is between a third and a half as dangerous as all the road traffic in the United Kingdom.

Give up? I’m talking about stairs. That’s right, humanity’s friend the humble stair. If stairs were invented today and a full analysis of their dangers were made, along with the gory statistics—the literally gory statistics—there would be an impassioned, sustained, and I’m pretty sure eventually successful campaign to have them banned on health and safety grounds. It’s happened to much safer things than stairs. Stairs are absolutely lethal. I even myself know someone killed by his own stairs, one of the 1,000-plus deaths in a typical year.* Yet we don’t perceive stairs as being risky. They’re filed away in the part of our consciousness where daily objects live, not in the part which attends to dangers and threats and risks to life. We don’t see these things entirely rationally, and familiarity breeds not contempt but a lack of attention. Why? We don’t really know.

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