“I now can say unequivocally that this book should be read by every high school student and every single journalist in the nation.”
~Robert Zimmerman, Historian, Science Writer, Film-maker, Blogger at behindtheblack.com
“Kenneth Green’s book is a devastating attack on the regulatory state.”
~ Norman Rogers, Physicist, Author, Founder of Rabbitt Semiconductor, Policy Advisor to the Heartland Institute
The Plague of Models
“Now that only a few keystrokes are needed to create most models, no care is needed. If the model spits out nonsense, no problem! We’ll change a few assumptions and see what pops out. Combine this with an imperative to derive conclusions that are favored politically, and it is not difficult to see that the world of modeling has become a plague. This book is destined to become a classic. Read it. Learn it. Live it. And don’t let your kids grow up to be modelers.”
~ Benjamin Zycher, Senior Fellow American Enterprise Institute
“We shouldn’t let our empiricism, nor, especially, our modeled pseudo-empiricism, make our decisions for us automatically, or as a substitute for human practical wisdom, especially as so many models today are so badly flawed. Ken Green drives this important point home.”
~ Steven F. Hayward, Resident Scholar UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and Visiting Lecturer at Berkeley Law
Sometimes, reading the news, it seems we are drowning in a sea of risks. Every day, dozens of news articles proclaim some activity, some exposure, some change in the environment exposes us to new and terrifying risks. And every day, governments in developed countries pop out regulations to ensure that we make those changes in behavior to address those supposed risks, whether we want to or not.
You probably think such claims, and regulation of risk are backed up by something resembling actual real-world evidence of harm. You probably assume that governments, when regulating, are relying on hard data: physical observations of exposures to a potential harm, physical measurements of harms that result from exposure, and that sort of thing.
But if you assume that, you are probably wrong. Since the computer revolution of the 1970s, actual hard evidence of risk have been replaced, both in the estimation of risks, and in the regulation of risks, with computer models simulations of reality – that may have little or no relation to the actual reality in which actual people live.
The book is about the influence of computer risk-modeling on public policy, specifically, the giant gushing fountain of EHS regulations that have poured forth since the 1970s. That shift to simulation of risk has led to a massive increase in regulation: a Plague of Regulation that rests on the Plague of Models.
The Plague of Models now available on:
Other books by Kenneth P. Green:
About Ken
I received my doctorate in Environmental Science and Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an M.S. in Molecular Genetics from San Diego State University, and a B.S. in Biology from UCLA. I have used my expertise for 25 years at public policy research institutions across North America. My list of publications includes policy studies, magazine articles, opinion columns, book and encyclopedia chapters, and two supplementary textbooks on climate change and energy policy intended for middle-school and collegiate audiences respectively. My writing has appeared in major newspapers across the US and Canada, and I appeared regularly on both Canadian and American radio and television. I testified before several state legislatures and regulatory agencies, as well as giving testimony to a variety of committees of the US House, US Senate and the Canadian House of Commons.
A large body of my work (over 1,000 op-eds, papers, etc.) can be found at Authory.com, here.