An alternative hypothesis is that bureaucracy results from the interaction between increasing wealth and loss aversion. In richer, more complex societies, mistakes become more damaging for the same reason that hurricanes do: there is more valuable stuff to be affected by both. And comfortable people with a lot to lose become more risk averse, raising the demand for bureaucrats.
My personal experience with this is shaped by my stint in Google bureaucracy: I was, for awhile, one of the ~10ish people whose approval was required to deploy changes to the search product. Each of us was tasked with preventing a different type of mistake. Together we created a stifling vetocracy, but it was hard to justify cutting out any one approval because the consequences of even a relatively small mistake-- say, one that would reduce search traffic by 0.1%-- were so large in dollar terms.
The best mitigation mechanism we had was to task the bureaucrats with making their "victims'" job easier: automating and checklist-ifying as much as possible of the approval process, so that people launching most changes could easily check for compliance on their own, and be assured we would quickly rubber stamp them if the checks passed. That is probably still an underused strategy in many other bureaucratic contexts.
For a geopolitical example of the tendency, think of how famously bureaucratic France is. French life is also famously comfortable and pleasant -- there is a reason for the German metaphor "wie Gott im Frankreich" -- and these two things are probably connected.
I am not sure I agree with the idea that there are too many people and not enough work, which leads to bureaucrats. There seems to be lots of work that isn’t getting done, and far too many people with meaningless degrees that don’t want to do real work, as well as a large number of people who believe everything can be controlled and want to pay others to do it. Those seem to be different problems that lead to bureaucracy.
I agree. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are over a half million open manufacturing jobs in the U.S. In addition, a recent report by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute projects a shortfall of nearly four million jobs between now and 2033.
As an economist, Dr. Kling should understand that while demand exists, jobs exist to meet that demand. That said, government can create unemployment with minimum wage laws, welfare programs that pay people not to work and penalize them when they do, occupational licensing, and onerous business startup restrictions. I don't think, however, that the solution to artificially created unemployment is to expand bureaucracy.
As it happens I wrote about this very thing in my last essay so I'll take the opportunity to post an excerpt here:
"It would seem that our modern advanced societies are just stuck with their modern equivalent of Dickens’ Circumlocution Office. .....Nobody really has any idea how to run an advanced urban society without it. What could realistically be done about the general Kafkaesqueness of the interface between us as individuals and The System?..... You could vote maybe for a government Bureaucracy Czar charged with ruthlessly stripping away all unnecessary bits of it....but we all know how that would end. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan set their political stall around reining it in - and they really did try but they failed anyway. Yes, America has a significant fringe tradition of separatism from the state leviathan (most famously the Amish) but not even the fiercest 21st century backwoodsman has any idea how this could be scaled up. So I will now ride out of the bureaucracy part of my essay leaving behind just a trail of choice epigrammatic quotes. Have a nice day:.... "
My company operates public parks and campgrounds on a concession basis, so I spend my whole day with government bureaucrats. I think the statement that b's run away from accountability is not quite right. It is more a matter of having really poor quality -- or more accurately, no -- performance management systems.
My private managers who operate public rec. areas have metrics for customer service, profitability, facility condition, relations with our partner agency, etc. Their opposite number, the government recreation officer with responsibility for the same areas, has none of these. They have no positive metrics -- no metrics for visitor satisfaction or total visitation or facility condition or revenue generation. They only have negative metrics -- avoidance of making a mistake in following myriad minute procedural rules and -- looming larger -- avoiding any situation where some external situation like a customer complaint or environmental issue brings negative attention to their bosses. Worst of all is the dreaded letter from some Congressperson or an unfavorable article in the newspaper. This incentive system creates extreme risk aversion to allowing anything new to occur.
Sorry, you can’t be even half libertarian and not mention the alternative of a serious tort system grounded in common law to quickly punish fraud and negligence and compensate victims. As soon as you give the state responsibility for regulation of production and trade, you open the door which leads inevitably to the labyrinthine, tumorous legal and regulatory systems which we have now. And it will get worse.
Yes. Seems to me Tove assumes only isolated regulations with none crossing over one another or many risks that require decisions over what truly matters - all things considered. Most issues can seem simple in isolation but nothing is in isolation.
Aside from the drag on the economy and the horrid effects on the joy of doing business, the sad part is the waste of (above average) human talent itself. In the U.S., for structural reasons, many of our best and brightest go to law school because they don't know what else to do. Then into compliance departments that are Kafkaesque ("Every day, K went to the castle to find out what he had been accused of").
Similarly, universities are stuffed with over-educated people doing trivial bureaucratic tasks at high cost in easy hours and rich benefits. Aside from PhD advisors, the advisors are in fact protectors of revenue, just in case the 18+ children can't read a course catalog. Somehow, back in the day, I made it through two degrees with no advisor in sight.
Trying to brainstorm on ways to offset rising bureaucracy, what if we just create a competing start up agency with streamlined procedures, minimal staffing and a scope specifically aimed at timeliness?
In other words, rather than trying to reform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which clearly amounts to a nuclear power suppression organization), we create an agency aimed at efficient approval of safe and reasonable nuclear power. Then we specifically allow any power company to proceed if it has approval by either agency (the new or old). Since every company will choose the new, the old becomes irrelevant and eventually wastes away.
Another example would be allowing drug approval if approved by any top-tier nation, rather than just the FDA. Or licensing approval for some occupations could be granted if meeting the standards for any state, rather than the one you are in.
Thus competition could be used as a quicker work around to bureaucratic sclerosis. Any agency would recognize that if it becomes too bloated and unresponsive that it could be threatened by a competing regulatory body with better responsiveness. We could even create a meta agency, whose job was to evaluate responsiveness of all the other agencies and recommend competition where they fail.
I read Parkinson years ago. I remember some details:
1) Laws and regulations are created purely to employ bureaucrats. If they actually do any good, this is an unintended (and undesirable) byproduct.
2) Bureaucrats have an incentive to increase their rank by hiring underlings. Those underlings will hire another layer of underlings, and so on.
3) Bureaucrats won't hire people more competent than themselves, as this comprises unhealthy competition. This process is repeated down the ranks, the only putative limiting factor being utter imbecility (though it is not clear whether this actually functions as a limiting factor.)
4) Ultimately, bureaucracy expands to consume all available resources (in a sea of imbecility.)
I would add that the ideology of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion was created specifically to remove all limiting factors to the expansion of bureaucracy, enabling the hiring of imbeciles, maniacs and outright criminals without setting off alarm bells.
It seems most people (including commenters to your post) have no clue how valuable inspectors are.
Milton Friedman said a lot of things outside the norm. The only one I can remember having difficulty with was his suggestion of getting rid of all regulation/rules and settle everything in the courts. That seemed totally absurd to me. The rules help avoid lots of things needing to go to court where outcomes are very uncertain. It avoids parties with lots of money running roughshod over those with no money to sue. They protect the non-experts from the experts (obviously not in all situations). Rules and regulation are to provide some standardization of what is and isn't acceptable. Inspectors add to this by finding some/most of the bad apples. Do we get this perfect? Of course not. Sometimes the rules or inspectors go too far but sometimes they don't go far enough. Scope creep is clearly an issue but much of our growth in rules, regulation, and inspection is from living in a more complicated society.
I suppose it is worth mentioning rent seekers. I'd argue bad regulation growth comes as much or more from people in a business area trying to keep others out as it is from the bureaucrats wanting more power.
I think bureaucracy and education should not be mutually exclusive. A lot of bureaucrats seem to enjoy administering without really doing research on emerging trends or issues. A compliance or regulatory department should not be a blind administerer to protocol but someone who studies the rules they are imposing. Ironically, universities appear to be more administration than education, even among the educators.
The famous part of Parkinson’s Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Parkinson wrote a satirical article about the British Admiralty after WWI. While numbers of the rank and file diminished along with the number of ships, the bureaucracy ballooned. Parkinson stated that bureaucrats—“officials”—create work for each other, and will not hire potential rivals, only subordinates. It follows that as each successive subordinate rises to his level of incompetence (apologies to Lawrence Peter!), he will hire a subordinate who is less intelligent than himself. This downward spiral continues until the system consumers itself.
The other day we were at a kids birthday party. My daughter asked two friends to come over after the party to play.
The first parent said "sorry, there is a lot of administration that goes into that".
(literally, I'm not making that up its a direct quote)
The second did let them come over to play, but he's a huge outlier. An expat with his own business and four kids. The only one I've met as a parent that would allow a child to walk down the block for an unscheduled play date.
How old are these kids? One of the things I like about living in Japan is that school age kids (i.e. age 6 or 7 and older) are expected to take themselves to school, friends houses etc. And they do so. There's a mini kids rush hour about 3:30 in the afternoon as kids get home, change out of uniform and then get back on bikes to go somewhere else
I have an example from my working life: I am an engineer who at times helps create 'specifications' for contracts for people to build things.
These could be quite simple: build a thing this big to fulfil this function.. etc.
However, they are often very long and full of odd details.. what are these clauses about: I think an assorted list of of words to counter things that prior specification writers had happen to them, or heard about, and therefore want to avoid happening again.
However, these things are just a small subset of a the infinite number of ways in which things can go wrong.
So lawyers add words to pass all risks to the other party (with a lot of argument).
And therefore there is no need for all these specific clauses..
However, then there would be no 'specification' which is seen as an important document. The final result of all of this...
A self fulfilling circular system creating bigger and bigger specifications. (which of course no one reads or cares about).
That was a fun discussion. Along the lines of the uses and mis-uses of bureaucracies is a new book by Dan Davies, ostensibly about Stafford Beer. He starts with this idea of an "accountability sink" and gets more interesting from there. From a review in the FT:
> We were witnessing what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink”: a situation in which a human system delegates decision-making to a rule book rather than an identifiable individual. If something goes wrong, no one is held to account.
> The starting point of Davies’ entertaining, insightful book is that the uncontrolled proliferation of accountability sinks is one of the central drivers of what historian Adam Tooze calls the “polycrisis” of the 21st century. Their influence reaches far beyond frustrated customers endlessly on hold to “computer says no” service departments. In finance, banking crises regularly recur — yet few individual bankers are found at fault. If politicians’ promises flop, they complain they have no power; the Deep State is somehow to blame.
> The origin of the problem, Davies argues, is the managerial revolution that began after the second world war, abetted by the advent of cheap computing power and the diffusion of algorithmic decision-making into every sphere of life. These systems have ended up “acting like a car’s crumple-zone to shield any individual manager from a disastrous decision”, he writes. While attractive from the individual’s perspective, they scramble the feedback on which society as a whole depends.
> Yet the story, Davies continues, is not so simple. Seen from another perspective, accountability sinks are entirely reasonable responses to the ever-increasing complexity of modern economies. Standardisation and explicit policies and procedures offer the only feasible route to meritocratic recruitment, consistent service and efficient work. Relying on the personal discretion of middle managers would simply result in a different kind of mess.
This has to be taken to its logical conclusion. Companies sell secretaries and politicians on things that they can bid on and win. Also companies sell regulators on rules that increase barriers to entry. It doesn’t just begin and end with bureaucrats as if in some Portuguese communist’s “vacuum”.
Again none have a better suggestion than 8 year term limits on Fed. bureaucrats. Which is certainly not perfect, but:
The perfect is the enemy of the feasible. (My new quote!)
Tove's idea/ hope that AI might help seems possible, too, but in her terms, "decision makers" are all the folks who can say "no". Our rich, safety-first culture has become far more risk averse. Most would say, too much in a few areas, but in the many areas they don't care so much about, it doesn't affect them so much. Diffuse costs of over-regulation/ over-safety.
As we get richer, our standards for "safe enough" go up. We could use better terminology for risks, like level 1 being 1 in 10 for the bad outcome. Is drunk driving next Friday like that? probably not,
nor L2 (1 in 100), tho maybe L3 (1 in 1000). With the number of 0s of the order of magnitude being the level, L6 is 1 in 1,000,000 and L9 is 1 in 1,000,000,000.
Russian Roulette at 1 in 6 would be L0.6 (?). L0.2 is 1 in 2, 50%, so we may have no single time events with such high risks, not even daredevil stunts.
Higher numbers less risky.
Totally safe doesn't really exist, but driving a car seems to be about 33k dead in 330 mln so 1 in 10k per year, an L4 risk or so.
Maybe we need some committee to decide -- and then a bureaucracy to denote official levels of risk for various actions folks do?
An alternative hypothesis is that bureaucracy results from the interaction between increasing wealth and loss aversion. In richer, more complex societies, mistakes become more damaging for the same reason that hurricanes do: there is more valuable stuff to be affected by both. And comfortable people with a lot to lose become more risk averse, raising the demand for bureaucrats.
My personal experience with this is shaped by my stint in Google bureaucracy: I was, for awhile, one of the ~10ish people whose approval was required to deploy changes to the search product. Each of us was tasked with preventing a different type of mistake. Together we created a stifling vetocracy, but it was hard to justify cutting out any one approval because the consequences of even a relatively small mistake-- say, one that would reduce search traffic by 0.1%-- were so large in dollar terms.
The best mitigation mechanism we had was to task the bureaucrats with making their "victims'" job easier: automating and checklist-ifying as much as possible of the approval process, so that people launching most changes could easily check for compliance on their own, and be assured we would quickly rubber stamp them if the checks passed. That is probably still an underused strategy in many other bureaucratic contexts.
For a geopolitical example of the tendency, think of how famously bureaucratic France is. French life is also famously comfortable and pleasant -- there is a reason for the German metaphor "wie Gott im Frankreich" -- and these two things are probably connected.
I am not sure I agree with the idea that there are too many people and not enough work, which leads to bureaucrats. There seems to be lots of work that isn’t getting done, and far too many people with meaningless degrees that don’t want to do real work, as well as a large number of people who believe everything can be controlled and want to pay others to do it. Those seem to be different problems that lead to bureaucracy.
I agree. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are over a half million open manufacturing jobs in the U.S. In addition, a recent report by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute projects a shortfall of nearly four million jobs between now and 2033.
As an economist, Dr. Kling should understand that while demand exists, jobs exist to meet that demand. That said, government can create unemployment with minimum wage laws, welfare programs that pay people not to work and penalize them when they do, occupational licensing, and onerous business startup restrictions. I don't think, however, that the solution to artificially created unemployment is to expand bureaucracy.
As it happens I wrote about this very thing in my last essay so I'll take the opportunity to post an excerpt here:
"It would seem that our modern advanced societies are just stuck with their modern equivalent of Dickens’ Circumlocution Office. .....Nobody really has any idea how to run an advanced urban society without it. What could realistically be done about the general Kafkaesqueness of the interface between us as individuals and The System?..... You could vote maybe for a government Bureaucracy Czar charged with ruthlessly stripping away all unnecessary bits of it....but we all know how that would end. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan set their political stall around reining it in - and they really did try but they failed anyway. Yes, America has a significant fringe tradition of separatism from the state leviathan (most famously the Amish) but not even the fiercest 21st century backwoodsman has any idea how this could be scaled up. So I will now ride out of the bureaucracy part of my essay leaving behind just a trail of choice epigrammatic quotes. Have a nice day:.... "
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
My company operates public parks and campgrounds on a concession basis, so I spend my whole day with government bureaucrats. I think the statement that b's run away from accountability is not quite right. It is more a matter of having really poor quality -- or more accurately, no -- performance management systems.
My private managers who operate public rec. areas have metrics for customer service, profitability, facility condition, relations with our partner agency, etc. Their opposite number, the government recreation officer with responsibility for the same areas, has none of these. They have no positive metrics -- no metrics for visitor satisfaction or total visitation or facility condition or revenue generation. They only have negative metrics -- avoidance of making a mistake in following myriad minute procedural rules and -- looming larger -- avoiding any situation where some external situation like a customer complaint or environmental issue brings negative attention to their bosses. Worst of all is the dreaded letter from some Congressperson or an unfavorable article in the newspaper. This incentive system creates extreme risk aversion to allowing anything new to occur.
Sorry, you can’t be even half libertarian and not mention the alternative of a serious tort system grounded in common law to quickly punish fraud and negligence and compensate victims. As soon as you give the state responsibility for regulation of production and trade, you open the door which leads inevitably to the labyrinthine, tumorous legal and regulatory systems which we have now. And it will get worse.
Yes. Seems to me Tove assumes only isolated regulations with none crossing over one another or many risks that require decisions over what truly matters - all things considered. Most issues can seem simple in isolation but nothing is in isolation.
Aside from the drag on the economy and the horrid effects on the joy of doing business, the sad part is the waste of (above average) human talent itself. In the U.S., for structural reasons, many of our best and brightest go to law school because they don't know what else to do. Then into compliance departments that are Kafkaesque ("Every day, K went to the castle to find out what he had been accused of").
Similarly, universities are stuffed with over-educated people doing trivial bureaucratic tasks at high cost in easy hours and rich benefits. Aside from PhD advisors, the advisors are in fact protectors of revenue, just in case the 18+ children can't read a course catalog. Somehow, back in the day, I made it through two degrees with no advisor in sight.
Undergraduate advisors as revenue protectors.... interesting thought! I had never thought of it that way.
Trying to brainstorm on ways to offset rising bureaucracy, what if we just create a competing start up agency with streamlined procedures, minimal staffing and a scope specifically aimed at timeliness?
In other words, rather than trying to reform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which clearly amounts to a nuclear power suppression organization), we create an agency aimed at efficient approval of safe and reasonable nuclear power. Then we specifically allow any power company to proceed if it has approval by either agency (the new or old). Since every company will choose the new, the old becomes irrelevant and eventually wastes away.
Another example would be allowing drug approval if approved by any top-tier nation, rather than just the FDA. Or licensing approval for some occupations could be granted if meeting the standards for any state, rather than the one you are in.
Thus competition could be used as a quicker work around to bureaucratic sclerosis. Any agency would recognize that if it becomes too bloated and unresponsive that it could be threatened by a competing regulatory body with better responsiveness. We could even create a meta agency, whose job was to evaluate responsiveness of all the other agencies and recommend competition where they fail.
Just spitballing.
Says Law for Bureaucrats sounds like a restatement of Parkinson's Law of Bureaucracy
I read Parkinson years ago. I remember some details:
1) Laws and regulations are created purely to employ bureaucrats. If they actually do any good, this is an unintended (and undesirable) byproduct.
2) Bureaucrats have an incentive to increase their rank by hiring underlings. Those underlings will hire another layer of underlings, and so on.
3) Bureaucrats won't hire people more competent than themselves, as this comprises unhealthy competition. This process is repeated down the ranks, the only putative limiting factor being utter imbecility (though it is not clear whether this actually functions as a limiting factor.)
4) Ultimately, bureaucracy expands to consume all available resources (in a sea of imbecility.)
I would add that the ideology of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion was created specifically to remove all limiting factors to the expansion of bureaucracy, enabling the hiring of imbeciles, maniacs and outright criminals without setting off alarm bells.
"Up to a point, bureaucrats are good."
It seems most people (including commenters to your post) have no clue how valuable inspectors are.
Milton Friedman said a lot of things outside the norm. The only one I can remember having difficulty with was his suggestion of getting rid of all regulation/rules and settle everything in the courts. That seemed totally absurd to me. The rules help avoid lots of things needing to go to court where outcomes are very uncertain. It avoids parties with lots of money running roughshod over those with no money to sue. They protect the non-experts from the experts (obviously not in all situations). Rules and regulation are to provide some standardization of what is and isn't acceptable. Inspectors add to this by finding some/most of the bad apples. Do we get this perfect? Of course not. Sometimes the rules or inspectors go too far but sometimes they don't go far enough. Scope creep is clearly an issue but much of our growth in rules, regulation, and inspection is from living in a more complicated society.
I suppose it is worth mentioning rent seekers. I'd argue bad regulation growth comes as much or more from people in a business area trying to keep others out as it is from the bureaucrats wanting more power.
I think bureaucracy and education should not be mutually exclusive. A lot of bureaucrats seem to enjoy administering without really doing research on emerging trends or issues. A compliance or regulatory department should not be a blind administerer to protocol but someone who studies the rules they are imposing. Ironically, universities appear to be more administration than education, even among the educators.
The famous part of Parkinson’s Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Parkinson wrote a satirical article about the British Admiralty after WWI. While numbers of the rank and file diminished along with the number of ships, the bureaucracy ballooned. Parkinson stated that bureaucrats—“officials”—create work for each other, and will not hire potential rivals, only subordinates. It follows that as each successive subordinate rises to his level of incompetence (apologies to Lawrence Peter!), he will hire a subordinate who is less intelligent than himself. This downward spiral continues until the system consumers itself.
The other day we were at a kids birthday party. My daughter asked two friends to come over after the party to play.
The first parent said "sorry, there is a lot of administration that goes into that".
(literally, I'm not making that up its a direct quote)
The second did let them come over to play, but he's a huge outlier. An expat with his own business and four kids. The only one I've met as a parent that would allow a child to walk down the block for an unscheduled play date.
How old are these kids? One of the things I like about living in Japan is that school age kids (i.e. age 6 or 7 and older) are expected to take themselves to school, friends houses etc. And they do so. There's a mini kids rush hour about 3:30 in the afternoon as kids get home, change out of uniform and then get back on bikes to go somewhere else
I have an example from my working life: I am an engineer who at times helps create 'specifications' for contracts for people to build things.
These could be quite simple: build a thing this big to fulfil this function.. etc.
However, they are often very long and full of odd details.. what are these clauses about: I think an assorted list of of words to counter things that prior specification writers had happen to them, or heard about, and therefore want to avoid happening again.
However, these things are just a small subset of a the infinite number of ways in which things can go wrong.
So lawyers add words to pass all risks to the other party (with a lot of argument).
And therefore there is no need for all these specific clauses..
However, then there would be no 'specification' which is seen as an important document. The final result of all of this...
A self fulfilling circular system creating bigger and bigger specifications. (which of course no one reads or cares about).
That was a fun discussion. Along the lines of the uses and mis-uses of bureaucracies is a new book by Dan Davies, ostensibly about Stafford Beer. He starts with this idea of an "accountability sink" and gets more interesting from there. From a review in the FT:
> We were witnessing what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink”: a situation in which a human system delegates decision-making to a rule book rather than an identifiable individual. If something goes wrong, no one is held to account.
> The starting point of Davies’ entertaining, insightful book is that the uncontrolled proliferation of accountability sinks is one of the central drivers of what historian Adam Tooze calls the “polycrisis” of the 21st century. Their influence reaches far beyond frustrated customers endlessly on hold to “computer says no” service departments. In finance, banking crises regularly recur — yet few individual bankers are found at fault. If politicians’ promises flop, they complain they have no power; the Deep State is somehow to blame.
> The origin of the problem, Davies argues, is the managerial revolution that began after the second world war, abetted by the advent of cheap computing power and the diffusion of algorithmic decision-making into every sphere of life. These systems have ended up “acting like a car’s crumple-zone to shield any individual manager from a disastrous decision”, he writes. While attractive from the individual’s perspective, they scramble the feedback on which society as a whole depends.
> Yet the story, Davies continues, is not so simple. Seen from another perspective, accountability sinks are entirely reasonable responses to the ever-increasing complexity of modern economies. Standardisation and explicit policies and procedures offer the only feasible route to meritocratic recruitment, consistent service and efficient work. Relying on the personal discretion of middle managers would simply result in a different kind of mess.
https://www.ft.com/content/0bb1b48f-b85a-4596-a0da-ac819bc69647
This has to be taken to its logical conclusion. Companies sell secretaries and politicians on things that they can bid on and win. Also companies sell regulators on rules that increase barriers to entry. It doesn’t just begin and end with bureaucrats as if in some Portuguese communist’s “vacuum”.
Again none have a better suggestion than 8 year term limits on Fed. bureaucrats. Which is certainly not perfect, but:
The perfect is the enemy of the feasible. (My new quote!)
Tove's idea/ hope that AI might help seems possible, too, but in her terms, "decision makers" are all the folks who can say "no". Our rich, safety-first culture has become far more risk averse. Most would say, too much in a few areas, but in the many areas they don't care so much about, it doesn't affect them so much. Diffuse costs of over-regulation/ over-safety.
As we get richer, our standards for "safe enough" go up. We could use better terminology for risks, like level 1 being 1 in 10 for the bad outcome. Is drunk driving next Friday like that? probably not,
nor L2 (1 in 100), tho maybe L3 (1 in 1000). With the number of 0s of the order of magnitude being the level, L6 is 1 in 1,000,000 and L9 is 1 in 1,000,000,000.
Russian Roulette at 1 in 6 would be L0.6 (?). L0.2 is 1 in 2, 50%, so we may have no single time events with such high risks, not even daredevil stunts.
Higher numbers less risky.
Totally safe doesn't really exist, but driving a car seems to be about 33k dead in 330 mln so 1 in 10k per year, an L4 risk or so.
Maybe we need some committee to decide -- and then a bureaucracy to denote official levels of risk for various actions folks do?
Nahhhh.