Going through my notes on There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer (@JessieSinger), and I figured I'd share them here as I process them.

This is a book about how our systemic decisions make America a dangerous place to live. It really made clear to me that Covid is nothing new. We've always been needlessly cavalier with each other's lives - especially the lives of the poorest and most marginalized among us.

You can get the book here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accidents/Jessie-Singer/9781982129682

@bookstodon #bookstodon non-fiction

The US is a uniquely dangerous place to live, among wealthy nations. One in 24 Americans will die by accident - a 40% higher rate than Norway, the next most dangerous.

It's especially dangerous if you're already marginalized. As Singer writes, "whether or not you die by accident is just a measure of your power, or lack of it"

Some accidents we try very hard to avoid. Others we accept as simply inevitable. Which kinds of accidents are which is not a matter of chance, it is driven by underlying power structures.

Back in the 1920s, when a person was killed by a car, people *rioted*.

Then the automobile industry began the process of normalizing traffic fatalities.

Core to their approach was an emphasis on human error. Accidents weren't due to systemic decisions (or corporate greed). It was all "human error". Pedestrians who didn't yield to cars were "jaywalkers" causing accidents.

The industry lobbied against restrictions like "speed governors" that would keep cars from going too fast and funded education campaigns to teach a new generation that roads were for cars.

(BTW, one of the things this book has really affirmed for me is the extent to which blaming individuals for problems is not just ineffective at solving the larger problem, it *actively works against *system change. It is a tool wielded by those in power.)

One particularly obnoxious manifestation of industry's focus on individual responsibility is Otto Nobetter.

Otto Nobetter was an education campaign designed by the industry group the National Council for Industrial Safety. It was formed largely because states started passing worker's compensation laws, so businesses suddenly had an incentive to protect their workers from injury and death.

Industry also tried to argue that some people are just "accident prone".

Psychologists, usually on the corporate payroll, conducted studies attempting to prove that people who got into accidents had something wrong with them: they lacked strong religious values, had trouble with authority, were divorcees or gamblers or had "a psychosexual need to court danger."

Of course this was all bunk, and yet another example of scientists cynically serving those in power. (See https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/)

History Professor Bryant Simon says "what we call accidents are in some ways manufactured vulnerabilities".

He wrote a book about the 1991 Hamlet Fire, which killed 25 workers, mostly black women. Simon refuses to blame the "greedy owners" who violated OSHA regulations.

"Those people did not just end up in that plant that day.
Historical forces brought a particular kind of person to that plant, and the fact that no one cared about them didn’t just begin that day.”

In chapter two (yes, that was only the first chapter, guys 😂) Singer brings us back to the late 1800s and the plague of railway coupling "accidents".

This topic is of particular interest to me, because my great-great-great-grandfather died trying to couple two train cars together. At the time he died, "automatic couplers" existed that would have done his job safely for him, but the railroads didn't want to cut into profit margins.

I wrote more about this story here: https://www.rethinkingpower.info/noble-fruits-motivated-reasoning/

Eventually congress intervened and forced the railroads to use automatic couplers. In the early 1990s, government intervened again, passing worker's compensation laws.

Previously, injured workers or bereaved relatives had to sue to receive compensation, and seldom won. New laws said that injured workers would *automatically* receive compensation from the companies that injured them.

Companies suddenly had an incentive to prevent injuries and deaths, and workplace accidents plummeted.

We see this pattern again and again: people dying in preventable "accidents" until companies are actually forced to protect people.

Hugh DeHaven, inventor of the three-point seat belt, in 1953 invited automakers to a conference to learn about safety technologies like the collapsible steering wheel. Most were not adopted until the late 1960s when Ralph Nader and the consumer safety movement started campaigning for them.

Hundreds of thousands died because it was cheaper for the auto industry.

Chapter 3 of Singer's book focuses on scale: "accidents" with low probability and big impact, like nuclear meltdowns and oil spills. I have fewer notes on this chapter, and they're mostly just ugh!!!!!"

Like, fun fact: David Rainey, VP of BP, lied to congress about how bad the Deepwater Horizon spill was. He was acquitted of obstructing congress: https://www.steptoe.com/en/news-publications/congressional-gamesmanship-leads-to-an-acquittal-in-deepwater-horizon-case-united-states-v-david-rainey-a-case-study.html (ugh!!!!)

Also: more than half of the fish species endemic to the Gulf of Mexico could be found after the spill (ugh!!!!)

(Pausing for the night; will come back and finish up the thread soon. Blogging one's notes takes more time than I predicted!)

Ok we're back. Time for Chapter 4, titled "Risk" but which I might title "Time to get mad about traffic engineering!"

Perhaps you already know that the crash test dummies used in test collisions are modeled after men. The "female" dummies are not modeled after women, they're just male dummies but smaller. *Too* small: at 4'11" & 108 lbs they represent only 5% of women.

The result? Women are "73% more likely to be injured and up to 28% more likely to be killed in a front-facing car accident".

Singer does a deep dive into the work of civil engineer Eric Dumbaugh.

Most of the US road engineering guidelines were written in the 50s and 60s. This was in the middle of the auto industry's campaign to convince the public it wasn't to blame for the tens of thousands of people who were suddenly being killed by cars.

They blamed "jaywalkers", they blamed individual bad drivers, and they also blamed roads. So road engineers tried to design roads to prevent accidents.

Engineers tried to make a "forgiving roadside". They tried to make suburban+city streets like interstates: straight, wide, and with as few trees and poles and people as possible. But that only encourages cars to treat city streets like interstates.

"Those curves, trees, and benches that engineers removed had actually been making drivers slow down to avoid the risk these hazards presented—without all that, drivers felt less at risk and more in control" so they drove faster & killed more people.

You might think road engineers would update their guidelines, but apparently they haven't!

Moving on. How do road engs determine the speed limit for a road? Turns out they measure how fast cars are already going on it Usually about 85% of the cars are going the same speed, and 15% are going faster. They set the limit at that threshold between the average speed and the 'fast car' speed.

"We look at how fast cars are going and we assume that is the safe speed of the roadway" says Dumbaugh

How many people does this methodology for setting speed limits kill? We don't know!

In 2018 9,000 people died in crashes attributed to speeding. But more than 36,000 people were killed in traffic accidents. If any of those accidents were caused by a road that was given too high a speed limit, it wouldn't be labeled as caused by speeding.

And if you thought the process for setting speed limits was bonkers and reckless, wait until you hear about crosswalks!

Guess how they decide where to place crosswalks! Whatever you're thinking, it's not callous enough.

"the rules actually discourage installing crosswalks or pedestrian walk signals at intersections unless the risk of an accident is extreme. According to those rules, a lower-risk way across a street—like a crosswalk and traffic signal—is only warranted if one hundred people cross a street every hour for four hours. **Ninety-nine people running across the highway is not enough of a risk.**"

Given how roads are designed, speed limits set, and crosswalks placed, I have to agree with Dumbaugh when he calls road engineering a "fraud discipline".

Why is it so bad? One cause might be education. The majority of traffic engineering programs in the U.S. "do not have a single course that covers the issue of road safety".

One study found that less than 25% of programs said they offered a safety course, and of those, a third didn't actually offer one.

Singer makes a really good point about how technologies can magnify harm:

"Applied to a whole system, the consequences of misperceiving risk get multiplied across the population [...] The risk perception of a person with power can create dangerous conditions for us all."

This is absolutely something us software devs need to grapple with. Silicon Valley is obsessed with scale, but as tools and systems scale, so does the potential harm of what might otherwise be small errors and oversights.

Ch 5 tackles stigma:

"While you may see an accidental overdose as different from a car accident, in many respects it is not," Singer writes.

"An accidental overdose happens when dangerous conditions stack up—addictive drugs marketed as nonaddictive, a lack of access to health care, or the threat of criminal prosecution if you call for help. [...] Stigma is what doctors call a “fundamental cause” of health disparities—an inescapable reason why some people die by accident and others do not."

Stigma gives rise to absurd situation where it is far easier to prescribe addictive drugs than drugs that treat addiction.

Doctors need no special training to prescribe OxyContin, but for buprenorphine, an opioid substitute which facilitates safe recovery, "doctors must fill out a pile of paperwork, get a special waiver from the Drug Enforcement Administration, and undergo an eight-hour training session. After all that, they’re only permitted to prescribe to a limited number of patients."

Bias and stigma also influence who gets access to buprenorphine. Doctors are 35 times more likely to prescribe it to white people than to black people.

This even though overdoses among black people are rising faster than overdoses among white people.

Singer writes: "In accidents, stigmas stack up, and race trumps them all."

Singer describes a vicious cycle wherein Black people are more likely to be harmed or killed in accidents due to systemic causes ("manufactured vulnerabilities") but are then more likely to be blamed for it, as individuals and as a race.

According to scholars Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, this is a form of "racecraft": when racism itself makes race seem more real.

Fields & Fields wrote a book about Racecraft, which is now on my reading list: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/233136/racecraft-by-barbara-j-fields-and-karen-e-fields/