Freakonomics Radio - 1. The Dangers of Safety

Episode Date: February 6, 2010

What do NASCAR drivers, Glenn Beck and the hit men of the NFL have in common?

What comes to mind risk-wise when I say the following things? Shark attacks. The biggest joke of all time. All right. Terrorist attacks. The biggest waste of time ever. This is Freakonomics Radio, a new podcast about the hidden side of everything. In this episode, what do NASCAR drivers Glenn Beck and the hitmen of the NFL have in common? Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

How about the risk of just something almost everybody does every day, driving your car? Incredibly low. That if nothing were to kill you except driving your car, and all you did was drive your car day and night, day and night, day and night, you'd expect to live for 250 years. Steve Levitt is the guy I write books with, Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics. He's a professor at the University of Chicago, and he looks like a professor. Skinny, thick glasses, comfortable shoes. No one's ever going to mistake him for a tough guy. But there aren't many things he's afraid of. You know why? Because he's a data guy who spent a lot of time figuring out what will kill you and what won't. So he thinks most of our fears are vastly overrated. I think it's a survival instinct for one thing, right?

You think about spiders and tigers and, you know, rhinos. I mean, things that we shouldn't be afraid of, bugs. I mean, but we're terrified of them. But I think people are predisposed to be frightened of things. And in a world of media where we're now bombarded, I mean, I think kidnapping is a great example. People used to be kidnapped a lot more than they are today. But you wouldn't hear about the little blonde girl who's being kidnapped in Utah if you lived in Chicago or in New York. But now a little blonde girl gets kidnapped and it's national news.

The media promotes fears because people love to read about scary stuff, like horror movies. Who in their right mind, if someone came from Mars, would think that horror movies would be this incredibly successful genre where people would try to scare themselves a lot.

People are afraid of needles. Don't go to the hospital and have the needles stuck in them just so they can get the fear. It's strange that how people's brains work that way. You know what's even stranger? Football. Instead of running away from scary things that are highly improbable, football players run into each other on purpose, really hard, without fear. Terrence Newman of the Dallas Cowboys. Terrence Newman is one of the hardest hitters in the NFL. You might think he's a big guy, but he's not. He's about 5'11", 190 pounds.

That said, he is a rock hard dude, or as he puts it, swole, as in swollen with muscle. On the field, Newman is famous for launching his body like a missile. If you're a cornerback, what's your favorite thing to do? Favorite thing is obviously get interceptions and running back for touchdowns. All right, second favorite thing then? Second favorite thing is blowing up receivers. All right, and for those who don't know what blowing up a receiver means, what does that mean exactly?

Or a running back, but it just means catching them with a good solid hit and basically a declutter. When you hit them and they go backwards and you go running over top of them and celebrating and going crazy and all that stuff. Robert C. Cantu, C-A-N-T-U. And how old are you? Older than you might think, 71. Robert Cantu is a professor of neurosurgery at Boston University, and he specializes in the study of traumatic encephalopathy, or major blows to the brain. So let's talk about the NFL.

I love the NFL. You love the NFL? Yes. The buildup is over, and away we go. Dr. Cantu and I are not alone. The Super Bowl has become a national holiday. More people watch it on TV than any other show. Millions of kids grow up with the dream of playing in the NFL, my own son included.

He's nine years old, 4'2", 54 pounds. He ain't exactly swole. He's nine years old, four foot two, 54 pounds. He ain't exactly swole. When is the last time that you know of that there's been an on-the-field death in football? There have been on-the-field deaths in football every single year since 1931, with the exception of 1990. Last year, there were five on-field deaths. This year, there have been two. Both, all five last year and both this year were due to brain injuries. So fatalities still occur, but they occur at relatively low rates compared with 36, 37, 38 deaths a year that were seen 40 years ago.

Four or five deaths? That's about the same number of people killed every year around the world in shark attacks. But who's afraid of football? Cantu says most football deaths occur in high school and college. There hasn't been a single on-field death in the NFL. I'm guessing if there was, if a cornerback like Terrence Newman blew up a receiver like Chad Ochocinco on national TV and he never got up again, people would be a lot more afraid of football than they are. I don't play with fear. I guess you get a little nervous about knowing your assignments or getting beat on certain things, but in terms of contact or anything like that, I'm not scared of any of that.

Quinton Michael plays strong safety for the Philadelphia Eagles. He's roughly the same size as Terrence Newman. He, too, is known for hitting very, very hard. The hardest hit I ever had was actually this year. It was me and a guy named Justin Fargus. He plays running back for the Oakland Raiders. And basically what happened, he had a toss and he was wide open, you know, basically screaming up the field. I was in the deep cover too. And I kind of, it was funny because he was running towards the sideline and I was running towards him and we he was running towards the sideline I was running towards him and we're both heading towards the sideline and it was almost like neither one of us was going to back down because we knew it was going to be either a big collision or not because he could have ran out he could have ran out of bounds but I just knew he was going to try to run me over just

watching him in film so essentially what happened was we basically ran full speed into each other and pretty much knocked each other out. And I tried to get up a little too soon, and I fell back down, and I was wobbling a knee, and eventually the trainers pulled me out, and, you know, they're like, you can't go back in right now. And actually he came out for a few plays too, so we both knocked each other out. But you tried to stay in the game. I did.

You know, as a competitor, you know, you don't, because you never know if he's going to get up or not. So you want to be the first one to get up, and you want to make sure that you didn't take, you know, the loss right there. So essentially, I think I won because I got up before he did, even though I did, you know, kind of wobbly knee and went back down. What did your actual head feel like afterwards, like immediately afterwards and then later on?

It was really, it's a really odd feeling. The first thing you get is everything starts to vibrate. It's like, vroom, like if you laid your head on your cell phone and put it on vibrate and someone called you, that's what it felt like for me. So instantly, I actually saw it on film, instantly like I grabbed my helmet and I tried to steady everything. And then after that initial vibration, it's almost like you're kind of in a dream. You're just kind of floating and your legs are like jello.

You're trying to stand up and your mind is trying to tell your body to do it, but your body and everything is disconnected. So you pretty much just fall flat back on your face, you know. Ouch. Our brains are designed to float around inside the skull to survive the daily bumps of life. But playing football is different. It's one tough guy running full speed into another guy traveling just as fast in the opposite direction. I asked Dr. Cantu what can happen to the brain in a collision like that. Well, the best analogy, or at least one that I think is useful, is to think of jello in a bowl.

And if you hit the bowl very forcefully, you'll see the jello oscillate. And if you put the jello into a bowl that is elliptical in shape, not round, and hit it, because you'll invariably hit off center, you'll see that the jello moves forwards and backwards and it also spins around in the bowl. And those are the primary forces that are imparted to the brain. The linear forces are those that are in one plane, front and back, or side to side. And the spinning forces are the rotational forces. And those combined forces cause shearing and straining of brain tissue. And that, in turn, leads to a metabolic cascade

of dysfunction that is what we refer to as a concussion. A metabolic cascade of dysfunction. In a big hit on the football field, the only thing standing between your brain and a beating like that is your helmet. Dr. Cantu is also affiliated with NOXI, the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment. It's a group that tries to make football helmets safer. Well, helmets are better today than ever before. The actual athletic equipment that is on the market today is better than athletic equipment that's been on the market in the past.

But the problem is, what are you asking that athletic equipment to do? And if you're asking it to prevent skull fractures, and if you're asking it to prevent most serious subdural hematomas, it does a stellar job. But if you're asking it to prevent concussion, it can't do it. So let's see if we have this right. Modern helmets do a good job of preventing skull fractures and on-field deaths. That's why those numbers are way down historically. But getting lots of concussions isn't very healthy either. To prevent them, Dr. Cantu could make a more cushioned helmet, but then you might be worried about skull fractures again. And then there's this problem.

If you did give football players a more heavily cushioned helmet, what are they going to do with it? A lot of people think the biggest problem in the game today is that players use their helmets not so much as protection, but as a weapon. The way, for instance, in football, in my opinion, that we're going to have to address this problem is to eliminate the helmet as the initial point of contact in the act of tackling and even to a certain extent in blocking as well.

Quite frankly, when people didn't have the helmets of the security that there are today, didn't have the face mask, and you had to worry about your nose winding up in your ear from using your face in a tackle. You didn't use your face, obviously. So as the safety equipment gets better, our behavior becomes more aggressive. Absolutely. Very much more aggressive, very much more violent. We've seen the same thing happen in ice hockey as well. And when you put face and head protection on people, they're not as worried about taking blows to that area. And so the aggressive nature of the activity is greatly enhanced. So wait a minute. Let's figure this out. If the helmet, which we think of as a safety device, is being used as a weapon, why not get rid of the weapon?

There are sports we play without helmets, rugby, Australian rules football. What happens if you try to play American football like they did in the old days, without a helmet? Here's Quentin Michael again. It would probably be, there'd be a lot less head injuries, I know that for a fact. And I can tell that the tackling would actually be a lot different. You know, you can't, you know, nobody wants to mess their face up willingly. So you wouldn't go in head first. You wouldn't go in trying to destroy somebody.

You'd go in just to get them on the ground, you know. And, you know, maybe it wouldn't be as exciting. I'm not sure, but I know there definitely wouldn't be as many injuries. Would it be as much fun? I assume you really like to hit, right? Yeah, I like the contact. That's what makes the game fun, you know. You got these receivers out there taunting you,

and you finally get a chance to wallop them. So that's good for me. All right. So for someone like you who loves to hit, especially these spindly little receivers who are always yapping, right, and you get to pay them back once in a while, and if you took away a helmet, right, if you took away helmets, could you still have a lot of fun playing the game? I don't think I would. You have to

wonder, if a guy like Quentin Michael doesn't have fun playing football without the amazing collisions, how much fun would we have watching it? And if you think it's fun watching two football players run into each other headfirst at 20 miles an hour. How about 20 cars crashing into each other at 180? You know, I started my career with a bad wreck in 1983 at Daytona. This is Randy LaJoy. He was a NASCAR driver for about 20 years. He won 15 races and more than $7 million. And I was passing Sterling Marlin to qualify for the Daytona 500, and the car hit the bump, got sideways, slid a long ways,

and Richard Petty had told me a story two weeks earlier while we're testing. He goes, man, you're going fast down here. He says, you're going to crash and when you do this, two things are going to happen. He says, you're going to either crash real quick and slide a long way or you're going to slide a long way and crash real hard. He goes, and if you could remember before you crash to reach down and pull your belts as tight as you can get them and take a deep breath, you'll be a lot better. Well, as I'm sliding and I see where I'm going to hit, I reach down and I tug down my belts as hard as I could. You know, in your early years, you learn not to let go of the steering wheel. So I put my hand back on the steering wheel.

And when I looked out the windshield and all I could see was sky, I said, well, it's about time I need to take a deep breath. I woke up in the hospital that night. I had a severe concussion. I was dizzy for, you know, some people say I'm still dizzy. But I had a headache for a couple weeks. But, you know, three weeks later, I was back, NASCAR North race, and then we won the championship. So, you know, it didn't bother me, it didn't kill me, and I went back to

win three races at Daytona. So Randy has seen sky, he's seen wall, and he's seen safety gear get better and better. Now that he's retired, he makes super safe aluminum seats for race cars. Some of the equipment, the fire suits and the helmets, were definitely as good as they could have been. But one of the things that we have realized is a head and neck restraint, something that holds your head on because if your body is strapped in, your head is not attached to anything, and you'll get the Dale Earnhardt, Kenny Irwin, Adam Petty, Tony Roper, Blaze Alexander, I mean, those guys before him that passed away with the same injury that we lost Dale with.

You know, once we lost the best we had, NASCAR says, OK, we got to stop this. So, I mean, years ago, I mean, if something happens, when you put the helmet on and you pull that strap tight, people say your brains go out the window. And that's a very good possibility. Tell me how all this safety in NASCAR, especially since 2001, has changed the sport, whether from a spectator perspective or from a strategy perspective or whatnot. Well, we're not going to any more funerals, which is good. How it has changed the sport is the new generation drivers, you know, they're not as sore on a Monday or Tuesday as the older generation drivers. You look at a 50-year-old NASCAR driver that's retired other than Mark Martin, you know, they have trouble tying their own shoes because they're beat up pretty hard. You know, your body's stretched.

They have trouble walking. You know, not a lot of difference than the older football players, you know. I mean, but we didn't get as many concussions as they did, but there's still a lot of guys out there that have hit their head. If I hit my head one more time, I could probably hide my own Easter eggs. Now, the risk, I guess, is that in other realms, maybe in racing as well, the more safety features you add on, the more reckless or the more aggressive people tend to get. And in racing, Well, I mean, racers were always aggressive. I know the walls that I hit before there were the soft walls, the safer barrier, hurt a lot more. The concrete walls hurt a lot more than that safer barrier does.

And one of the things that the drivers of this era haven't felt is really a concrete wall. It makes sense. If you're not worried about hitting a concrete wall, you might drive a little harder, take a few more chances. If you're all strapped into your car, surrounded by a big exoskeleton, you don't feel so vulnerable anymore. As a kid, tell me, what was the car you remember driving as a kid in the backseat with your parents? What did they drive? 1972 Impala station wagon. I think it was a 72.

It was the one, it was a 74, I can't remember. It was the one with the rounded back and the tailgate went down underneath the car. Do you remember that? It didn't swing open. Oh, it was ugly. Oh, it was ugly. Ooh, it was ugly. You might recognize this voice. It's Glenn Beck, the talk show host.

Welcome to a special edition of the Glenn Beck Program. I like to call it our egghead hour. Now, compare... Now, your younger children now are under 10? Mm-hmm. Okay, so compare now the kind of environment you were in safety-wise as a kid no there's no i mean we didn't even wear seat belts we were i mean i remember you know

sitting next to my dad and you know i maybe i was eight i'm like dad let me drive you know and he'd hear a steer a little bit i mean it was nuts. It was nuts. Now, you know, everybody's belted and, you know, safety harnesses in the car seats. And my wife, we were, where were we? We were someplace recently. And this kid was sitting and must have been i don't know about six and we were at a stoplight and she saw the kid um stand up out of the seat and lean over the shoulder of her dad who was you know driving in the car and my wife was like oh my gosh they're not belted i mean it was like you know it's I don't know, we've got to call SWAT.

Quick, get the belt police out. I mean, it happened, you know, we all lived, we survived, it's okay. These days, Beck drives a Mercedes sedan. It's new, shiny and black, everything is in its place. I hopped a ride home with him the other day. I asked him, why'd you buy this car in particular? I was standing in the dealership and it was, um, cause I was looking at an Audi as well. And, um, and, uh, the guy, you know, said to me, he said, you know, just, this has some

amazing safety features. Um, it knows when the car is going to roll if your window is rolled down it immediately rolls your window up it has the side airbags your seats depending on what the car senses it's going to do it puts the seat in the right position you know i mean it's it makes me want to flip the car. I'm like, I'm going to put my seat in the most awkward position, and I'm going to flip it. This is like the safest car on the road. He used the term death proof. But I honestly didn't even think about it until we were, until I was driving it. And I thought, I've taken a corner,

I really was taking a corner a little too fast. And I'm like, I can handle it. What's the worst that can happen? So Glenn Beck buys a car that a salesman calls death proof and finds himself driving a little more recklessly. Football players get better helmets. They start using them as weapons. Is there a way to describe this behavior? Economists like Steve Levitt know it as the Peltzman effect. So the Peltzman effect, which is named after a good friend of mine, Sam Peltzman,

a colleague of mine, one of the most outlandish dressers who's ever walked the earth, is the idea that you can put in a safety device and people can then feel so much safer in the activity they're engaging in that they take more and more risk to the point where you actually have the opposite effect, that by putting the safety device, you lead to more people being hurt or killed. And the classic example people talk about is seatbelts in cars. And the idea would be without a seatbelt, you feel at risk. With a seatbelt, you drive in a much more dangerous fashion,

and that could lead to more deaths. Now, you sound skeptical. I do not believe that there ever has been convincing evidence of a single Peltzman effect. Now, there are little bits and pieces of evidence you can find. So, for instance, it does seem true that after you put in seatbelts in cars, there might have been a minuscule increase in the number of pedestrians who were killed, but that was overwhelmingly swamped by the number of drivers who were not killed and passengers of drivers who were not killed

and passengers in cars who were not killed because they wear them. One thing that economists understand well is that people respond to incentives. That's what economics is at its root, is trying to understand how people respond to incentives. The Peltzman effect is a very deviant, over-the-top example of that, in which people respond so strongly to the incentives that they actually end up undoing the benefit that the safety device was supposed to have in the first place.

I've got to agree with Levitt, at least when it comes to driving. There are fewer traffic deaths per mile in the U.S. than ever before, and that's because of safety measures like seatbelts, not to spite them. Sure, Glenn Beck might feel invulnerable in his death-proof car, but since his own safety is at stake here, and that of his wife and kids, he surely doesn't want to get too reckless. But what about safety gear that protects you while harming someone else, like a football helmet? Or what about all the radiation we absorb in medical tests, radiation that probably causes cancer? And what about a safety net like legalized abortion? When you can reverse the effect of risky behavior, like unprotected sex,

aren't people more likely to engage in such behavior? The fact is that our craving for safety has its costs. The other fact is we spend way too much time being scared of things like shark attacks and terrorist attacks. Things that, in the end, are astronomically unlikely. We're getting more and more hyped up about a world that's less and less dangerous. And you know what's really weird? A lot of the dangerous stuff we do these days, like football, is stuff we do for kicks, not out of necessity, but on our own volition. If you think about it, risk is becoming a luxury good. Kind of like Glenn Beck's death-proof Mercedes.

What? So I didn't stop at the stoplight and I'm going 190. What? I can flip it? I'll survive? It's the death-proof car. What a dope. Thanks for listening to Freakonomics Radio. Next time, we'll look at how much it costs every time you shove a cheeseburger in your mouth, and if that can be taxed. Until then, keep your ear out for excerpts of interviews with Quentin Michael, Glenn Beck, and others on our website, Freakonomics.com.

Subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on iTunes, and the next episode will come to you in your sleep. Freakonomics Radio is produced by me, Molly Webster, with Stephen Dubner, and some help from our engineering friends.