Less risk of disaster, yes. Whether that counts as less risk depends on your definitions.

Risk management is commonly done by a branch of mathematics known as Decision Theory. That can get quite complicated, but this particular point is fairly simple.

The problem is that you usually have competing dangers such that decreasing the probability of one of them increases the risk of another.

You have to consider the costs of each plan of action (“cost” doesn’t mean money, it means anything you do or do not want to happen), and each possible outcome from each of them, consider the probabilities of those outcomes, and then find some property (usually the average, but it can be other things) of the probability distribution of costs that you want to minimise.

I emphasise – “cost” doesn’t mean money. Money is sometimes used as a unit of conversion between different sorts of danger, to make it easier to compare, but it isn’t really what it is about. Simple example – I have $10,000 which I can spend on drugs for one cancer patient, or insulin for a hundred diabetics. It looks at first like you’re setting a dollar price on somebody’s life, but actually you’re balancing one life against a hundred lives.

A disaster is just an outcome that has a very high cost. But it has to be offset against all the other outcomes, and it is rare for the optimum to be such that any of the risks are reduced to zero. The optimum point generally tolerates some non-zero probability of disaster, and trying to reduce it only increases all the other risks more.

It’s not uncommon for “risk management badly done” to only consider one side of the balance. One particular high impact outcome becomes the focus of attention, and all the others are ignored. The action taken reduces the risk of that particular disaster, but increases the overall risk, and cost to society. In saving one life, you blight a hundred others. With competing risks, there is no risk-free option open to you.

I’m confused. Are you responding to my post? Because I did mention “risk management…poorly implemented.”

Are you saying that “risk management badly done” can lead to less risk? That doesn’t even make sense to me. Sorry. “Risk management badly done” succeeds mostly by luck (and conscientious people at the worker level who implement their own risk management & safety measures), not because it actually leads to less risk.

Risk management badly done can make errors in both directions. Ignoring it can thus make disasters either more or less likely.

…and it isn’t – or shouldn’t be – that disasters cost money (though they do). It is that disasters are more likely to happen PERIOD, thus causing harm to everyone and everything within the scope of the disaster, when risk management is ignored or poorly implemented; a truism that seems to be lost behind a haze of $$ signs.

If airlines cut costs, lives are put in increased danger. When a doctor makes a mistake in diagnosis is not cause for concern because there might be a malpractice suit, but that a wrong diagnosis causes harm to the victim(s) of that diagnosis.

Counting costs involves a helluva lot more than money.

As usual, the barn door will be shut after the horses have escaped; hopefully, this catastrophe will lead to corrective action at the Interior D
Department and proposals for deep water drilling will be far more carefully scrutinized in the future. Of course, if the Rethuglicans return to power in 2012, such corrective action will go by the boards until the next disaster.

It’s not easy. BP clearly didn’t even come close to getting it right, and now they’re paying, and will keep paying.