WHAT WORKS
A. Etzioni
There is a humbling lesson in the recent sharp decline in highway fatalities. Traffic accidents are a major social problem by any standard and until recently more Americans died each year on the roads than in all the years of war in Southeast Asia, roughly 55,000 in 1970 . . . .
Over the years the problem was studied and a variety of efforts were launched to correct it. Some favored the educational approach, especially driver education classes and public persuasion campaigns. Others subscribed to technological cures: redesign the automobile. . . and redesign of the roads. Still others appealed to the long arm of the law, asking for stiffer penalities for traffic violators and mandatory use of seat belts, and yet another set of people pointed to alcohol as the major cause of fatal accidents. . . .
Then came the energy crisis, hardly designed by any traffic safety council, and the 55 mile an hour speed limit introduced oddly enough, not to save lives but to conserve energy. Since then the slaughter on the highways has been curtailed by more than 23 percent . . . .
The moral? Our capacity to engineer society is at a relatively early and primitive stage. . . . The easy optimism that goes with the assumption that we can design a quick cure for most things that ail us is not called for. It results in oversell of what science and technology can do for the highly intricate societal world, whose dynamics we are only slowly learning to understand.
