Accident

There Are No Accidents

In the new book There Are No Accidents, author Jessie Singer argues that basically everything we consider to be an “accident” — be it car accidents or fatal fires or workplace injuries — are in fact not accidents at all. Humans, Singer writes, make mistakes all the time, but it’s the dangerous conditions in our built environments that result in fatal consequences. Larger systemic forces, shaped by corporations and governments, intersect to create vulnerabilities that we don’t all share equally. Anticipating and reducing those opportunities for human error is the key to preventing needless death. (Vox)

Another interview with the author

The word “accident” performs a useful service to those who deploy it: it closes off any further questions. To call something an accident is to claim that there is no valid answer to why it happened nor how to prevent events like it.

But accident has contradictory meanings: in one sense accidents are out-of-the-blue events that no one could have prevented and for which no one is responsible, but in the sense of “accidents happen” they are entirely predictable, at least in the aggregate (as any actuary can attest).

The solution, says Singer, is to “apply a harm reduction model to every corner of the built environment.”

Accidents And Power

From There Are No Accidents:

In accidents, power in all its forms—be it a fast car or a plea deal—decides which story we hear. Across the United States, and across history, I found this as a common marker of accidents: the people who tell the story are always the powerful ones. And the powerful ones are rarely the victims. In this way, surviving a mistake in America is a mark of privilege.

As noted below, those with the least power (minorities and those in Poverty) are most likely to be harmed by so-called accidents. In many ways, accidental death is the statistically predictable result of inequalities of power: the greater the inequality, the more likely the powerful are to harm (intentionally or not) the less powerful and the more likely they are to be able to insulate themselves from the consequences of these events.

As Singer puts plainly:

Throughout history, when the economy was booming, accidental death also peaked. Nationwide, more income inequality means more accidental death. (emphasis mine)

Stats

More people die by accident today than at any time in American history.

Over 173,000 people per year, the equivalent of a fully-loaded 747 crashing every day, and yet we accept these preventable deaths as normal and there is no national conversation or policymaking focused on preventing them.

One in twenty-four people in the United States will die by accident. And among wealthy nations, the problem is distinctly American…

You are significantly more likely to due by accident in the Unites States than in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, or the U.K. And the gap is significant. In 2008, the rate of accidental death in the United States was more than 40% higher than Norway, the next most-dangerous wealthy nation, and 160% higher than the Netherlands, the safest wealthy nation.

Perhaps our collective inaction stems from the fact that these preventable deaths are equity distributed:

Black people die in accidental fires at more than twice the rate of white people. Indigenous people are more than three times as likely as white people to be accidentally killed by a driver… Across the board, the states with the highest rates of accidental death are also the poorest.

When cars are involved, the inequities are magnified:

In 2019, on average, U.S. drivers killed twenty-one pedestrians every day. Disproportionately, the dead were Latino, Black, and Indigenous. The rate of accidental pedestrian death is 87 percent higher for Latino people, 93 percent higher for Black people, and 171 percent higher for Indigenous people than it is for white people. Black people are more likely to be found at fault walking in the street, less likely to be offered justice if killed there, and more likely to be killed there.” (p. 138)