A thought about brain injury

I watched a television program last night about football and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). The program made what sounded like a reasonable case that hitting people hard on the head repeatedly for a long time could lead to permanent brain injury and mental problems. It seems likely that it would be very hard to obtain a complete understanding of the pathology; it would seem likely that the pathology would depend on the history of injuries, the treatment of the injuries, the physical condition of the athletes, their genetics, the development of their brains when injuries took place, substance abuse, etc.

I think that, from the point of view of decision making, there are similarities between that situation and climate change, consumer protection against defective products, and other situations. In climate change, for example, it is more than a century since Arrhenius proposed that changes in Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could account for climate change, and today something like 95 percent of scientists who study the atmosphere agree that man made greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere and causing rapid global warming. Yet the system that they study is incredibly complicated and it will take a long time to fully understand the climate, how it changes, and how climate change on a global basis affects climate change in each part of the earth.

We faced a similar decision problem with respect to smoking and the risk of cancer, and it took decades before the U.S. government took serious action to warn smokers of the danger that they were accepting by their habit, while cigarette company executives protected their company profits while denying the credibility of the accumulating evidence.

How do you make decisions in such cases. If you are a mother, you may suggest your kid play soccer rather than American football since soccer players get hit in the head a lot less than do football players. I would prefer that we limit greenhouse gas emissions rather than tun the risk of changing the climate for centuries in ways that would damage the current balance of life on earth and the prospects of the members of Homo sapiens.

I would suggest that the football league executives who made decisions on head injuries and the coal and oil company executives making decisions on greenhouse gas policy understand the principle. They after all are making decisions based on partial information on long term impacts, and choosing paths that protect the profits of their industries. Their decisions are conservative in terms of the short term interests of their industries (and their own pay and bonuses). 

The difference is short versus long time horizons and global versus local costs and benefits. Government is the obvious place where the long term interests of the majority can be taken into account to pass laws to protect against problems caused by too vigorous exploitation of short term profits by individuals or minorities. Unfortunately, our political system says companies have the same rights of free speech as real people and that money may not be regulated in the volume of noise it creates.

My interest in professional sports has decreased as it has become a bigger and bigger business in which multimillionaires compete among themselves. It will be less in the future as it seems that even watching contact sports on TV is likely to promote long term injury among the athletes.