Life is about choices...

A few years ago I was lucky enough to take a trip to follow the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in Peru. Machu Picchu is often referred to as the "Lost City of the Incas", or at least it was lost until a US historian Hiram Bingham rediscovered it after several centuries of lostness in 1911. Since then it has become a major tourist destination, attracting close to 400,000 visitors per year, many of whom travel south from the USA. It was a great trip, to what is a magical place. For some reason, though, I regularly recall a particularly inconspicuous memory from the trip. I was walking outside of Aguas Calientes, which was the small town nearby to Machu Picchu, one afternoon at the base of a very steep rock face. On a part of this face some wise old bean had knocked in some metal rungs, to form a kind of ladder that stretched a hundred odd feet up to a ledge, where presumably you could get a decent view of the area. At first glance the ladder looked reasonably official and fairly well put together, so I decided to head upwards. I got about 5-6 rungs up the ladder and thought this just isn't safe, because there wasn't much to cling on to and it was for all intents and purposes a vertical incline. So I lowered myself back down, and began to ponder why someone could be allowed to put such an unsafe ladder there. I will call my Peruvian legal council I joked to myself.

Later that afternoon back at the backpackers lodge I was staying at I saw a couple returning from what clearly had been an unsucessful tourist outing. The couple were American and the lady was on crutches having just returned from hospital. She had broken her leg in a fall, and they were picking up their gear before heading home from their now shortened "holiday of a lifetime". I asked the husband what had happened. They had been out having a stroll around Aguas Calientes the previous evening and had seen a metal runged ladder hammered into a vertical rock face, that appeared to lead a hundred odd feet up to a good lookout point. They headed up, thinking that it was a little unsafe, but thinking that it couldn't be too unsafe because otherwise someone would have put a warning sign up, or something health and safety conscious to that effect. Unfortunately his wife had fallen from about the 20th rung up, and had broken her leg in the fall.

What was interesting to me was that this guy was angry at what had happened, not with his wife, but with the local tourist authorities for the ladders existence. He said that if he could have sued somebody he would, and would certainly have done so if it had happened back in the USA. I listened to his unfortunate situation sympathetically - on the exterior, but in the quiet avenues of my mind I was thinking "what a pair of muppets". I regularly think about this when the concept of personal responsibility is up for discussion. Sometimes there are fairly humorous examples of a society's willingness to "outsource" personal responsibility and pass it into the hands of a legal body, agency, a committee, anybody really. For example:

I was reading a newspaper report earlier this week, that outlined how a Brooklyn jury awarded just over $4.5mm to Anderson Alexander, a former New York City police detective injured when the office chair he was sitting on tipped over and he shot himself in the knee with a 9mm Smith & Wesson he was holding.

"This case is not about him shooting himself," Alexander's lawyer Matthew Maiorana told the Daily News. "This case is about a broken chair and an unsafe workplace..."

I cracked on searching for further gems of this nature. You don't have to search very hard...

"A Canadian woman whose 9-year-old son tunneled (under a fence) into an electric sub-station and was badly burned is suing the Manitoba power utility for negligence"
"Brian Hopkins, 25, of Astoria, Queens, New York City, 'who survived an electric shock and fire two years ago when he climbed atop an empty, stationary Amtrak train after a night bar hopping in Boston is suing the railroad - because Amtrak didn't do enough to protect trespassers like him."

These cases are at the comical end of the spectrum, here silly individuals claim that it's someone elses fault that they are silly. Silliness all round you could say. I recall a university lecturer of mine talking about how economics was about choices. He recalled an experience when his 8-year-old daughter and him were going on a walk. He had told her to take her jacket because it was chilly outside. "No, I don't need it," she refuted. He explained to her that she would get cold if she didn't have her jacket, yet she still insisted she didn't need it. "Fine", he said and they went out for the walk. Five minutes later she began to start muttering about how cold it was and was rubbing her arms. What was his response to this? Cut the walk short? Give her his coat? No, he made her walk the rest of the way home enduring the cold. "Life is about choices", he explained to his daughter.

60 years ago people reading this article would say of this example, “Well done, he taught his daughter a valuable lesson.” But today, many reading this would cry, “Child Abuse!". Personal protection is obviously good, but only up to a point. In the liberal societies that we live, freedom of choice is generally considered to be a good thing. I agree. The price of that though, should be that you bear the consequences of the choices that you make, again up to a point. The various groups that have the goal to help people make better choices - governments, regulators, charities etc. - should not by accident be encouraging people to be less self aware and take more risks because of the insurance and legal claims they can call upon if something goes wrong.

The current financial mess is in large part caused by risk-taking behaviour that was excessive because it was fed by a feeling that if something went wrong then the fall out would be somewhere else and somebody elses problem. This runs right through the financial system: from the guy with a poor credit rating, who bought a house he could only afford in very specific circumstances, sold to him by a mortgage broker who knew that he wouldn't be responsible for that loan for more than about 20 seconds, to the banks that bought these loans with a view to repackaging them and selling them on to a hedge fund manager who was investing money that wasn't his, to the successful property millionaire who had invested his money with the hedge fund on the back of making vast fortunes building cheap homes that were being sold to those who couldn't really afford them if the truth be told. Each one of those participants were encouraged by the notion that the personal "fall-out" of their actions could be blamed and claimed against somebody else. Wise up, because now it's every man for himself.

As Herbert Spencer aptly said, “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”