This episode contains strong language and mature themes.
If you're listening with young kids, I strongly urge you to save this one for later.
This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
There's an old saying, the best things in life are illegal, immoral, or fattening.
There's another way to think about this.
Many things that give us pleasure, sex, food, adventure, they contain risks.
As a smart species, we've come up with ways to minimize those risks.
Condoms, seat belts, drugs to lower cholesterol.
But something interesting happens as we do this.
As we move the risk benefit calculation for each activity away from the risk end of the spectrum to the benefit end of the spectrum, we imagine people will become safer.
Seatbelts, for example, will keep drivers from getting hurt.
Now that would be true if people kept doing things exactly the way they did before.
But some people make another calculation.
If putting seatbelts in cars means you are likely to survive a crash, there's now a temptation to go faster.
An ocean swimmer might go out a little further when a lifeguard is nearby.
Football players who know their heads are protected by helmets might start to hit a little harder.
This phenomenon has a curious name.
Economists call it moral hazard.
It's a bit of a misnomer because moral hazard has little to do with morality.