PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

1. SCIENCE AND FORETELLING
SAFETY IN CARS
Annual deaths
per 100,000
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
FIGURE 1.1 The annual number of deaths from motor vehicle accidents per
100,000 population has been fluctuating around 24 since the mid 1920s. The
peak in the late 1960s provoked a public outcry that resulted in legislation making
seat belts mandatory. The little circles indicate how deaths from car
accidents evolved since 1988 when this graph was first published.
analyst has put it rather bluntly: “I am sure that there is, in effect, a desirable
level of automobile accidents—desirable, that is, from a broad
point of view, in the sense that it is a necessary concomitant of things of
greater value to society.” 6 Abolishing cars from the roads would certainly
eliminate car accidents, but at the same time it would introduce
more serious hardship to citizens.
An invariant can be thought of as a state of well-being. It has its
roots in nature, which develops ways of maintaining it. Individuals may
come forward from time to time as advocates of an apparently welljustified
cause. What they do not suspect is that they may be acting as
unwitting agents to deeply rooted necessities for maintaining the existing
balance, which would have been maintained in any case. An
example is Ralph Nader’s crusade for car safety, Unsafe at Any Speed,
published in the 1960s, by which time the number of fatal car accidents
had already demonstrated a forty-year-long period of relative stability.
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