Whoops! by John Lanchester

Author:John Lanchester [Lanchester, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-08-05T23:00:00+00:00

5. 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 been avoided, if it weren’t for a single mistake. It was the mistake which underpinned all the other mistakes and errors of judgement; it was the mistake which brought the global economic system up to the edge of the abyss, and although in some senses it is not a single mistake, because it was made by lots of people in lots of different places over 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 pounds, 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 the bet: 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 4x4 roaring down the road outside, or the mugger lurking behind the wheelie bin. 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 UK every year, year in year out, and yet you’ve never heard a word about the dangers it represents. Bear in mind that road accidents – that’s drivers, passengers, pedestrians, cyclists, everybody – cause fewer than 3,000 deaths a year. So this killer is between a third and a half as dangerous as all the road traffic in the UK.

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 was made, along with the gory statistics – the literally gory statistics – then 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-odd 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 of our head 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.

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