An Accident Waiting to Happen?

I drive for a living. I have now covered thousands of miles without an accident.

There are 2 tempting conclusions. There are 2 tempting conclusions. The first is that I must be an exceptionally good driver. The second is that the law of averages is waiting behind a hedge with a clipboard.

Neither is quite right.

Experience matters. The more miles I drive, the better I become at spotting the little signs that somebody is about to change lanes without looking, brake for no obvious reason or discover their turning only after they have passed it.

You learn to expect the unexpected, although that phrase is rather ruined by people who use it to mean absolutely anything.

You notice the car drifting slightly within its lane. The driver looking sideways. The brake lights appearing for no obvious reason. You begin to recognise the difference between someone who knows where they are going and someone who is about to make their uncertainty everybody else's problem.

That must reduce risk.

But every extra mile also gives something else another chance to go wrong. Experience may make each journey safer, while the sheer number of journeys increases my exposure overall. Both can be true.

A clean driving record probably indicates patience, anticipation and at least a reasonable degree of competence. It also contains a fair helping of luck. I cannot control the deer in the road, the tyre carcass falling from a lorry or the driver who has decided that looking at a telephone is more urgent than looking at the carriageway.

What it does not mean is that an accident is somehow due.

Probability does not notice that I have escaped trouble for several years and decide that fairness now requires a collision. Yet people think like this all the time. A long run of success becomes proof of brilliance. Then, when something goes wrong, it was apparently inevitable because the good run had lasted too long.

This sort of reasoning becomes even worse when politics enters the room.

A government takes office and inflation falls. Its supporters declare victory. Inflation rises and its opponents declare economic sabotage. Energy prices, interest rates, wages, exchange rates and policies already in motion are quietly pushed aside because they complicate matters.

Something happened after something else, therefore the first thing caused the second.

Sometimes it did. Quite often it did not. The awkward bit is showing how.

The same trick appears everywhere. Migration rises and crime rises, therefore migration caused the crime. Police numbers fall and crime also falls, therefore police numbers do not matter.

The conclusion comes first. The explanation is then bolted onto it afterwards, usually with great confidence.

A proper explanation has to show what changed, how it affected behaviour, what else was happening and what would probably have happened anyway. That is harder work than pointing at 2 events on a graph, so naturally it is less popular.

Without that missing mechanism, the argument is no stronger than blaming the driver because the car developed a fault after he bought it.

Personal anecdotes are no better.

I have driven thousands of miles without crashing, therefore I am a superb driver. My grandfather smoked until he was 90, therefore smoking is not dangerous. I once knew a dishonest claimant, therefore claimants are dishonest.

The anecdote may be entirely true. It may still prove next to nothing.

Most outcomes have several causes operating at once. Skill matters. Luck matters. Policy matters, but so do circumstances that no government controls. Individual choices matter, but those choices are made within wider conditions.

This does not make explanation impossible. It merely means that explanation requires rather more effort than spotting that one thing happened after another and announcing causation.

My accident-free record deserves some credit. I would be a fool to think it proves immunity.

Experience improves the odds. Exposure gives the odds more chances to go against me.

The danger begins when we turn that uncertainty into a tidy story, then mistake what happened next for why it happened.