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Genealogies Of Risk: Searching For Safety, 1930s-1970s, William Boyd

Publications

Health, safety, and environmental regulation in the United States are saturated with risk thinking. It was not always so, and it may not be so in the future. But today, the formal, quantitative approach to risk provides much of the basis for regulation in these fields, a development that seems quite natural, even necessary. This particular approach, while it drew on conceptual and technical developments that had been underway for decades, achieved prominence during a relatively short timeframe; roughly, between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s--a time of hard looks and regulatory reform. Prior to this time, formal conceptions of …