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Cultural Understandings Of Risk And The Tyranny Of The Experts, Molly J. Walker Wilson

All Faculty Scholarship

Every year, law-makers and agency regulators, with the input of industry experts and scientists, make hundreds of decisions about how to regulate conduct and allocate resources to address various types of risks that threaten the well-being of American citizens. In fact, managing and minimizing risk is one of the most important tasks of today’s policy-makers. In spite of this fact, most actions are taken without systematic consideration of the preferences of the very people whose welfare is at stake. There are two reasons for this. First, the dominance of Traditional Risk Analysis, with its emphasis on statistics and cost-benefit analysis, …