My aunt’s beloved husband John Adams died last month in London. I’d had the chance to talk with him a fair amount over the years—they got together and married fairly late in life, both after earlier marriages.
The emotional and sociological rhythms of faculty life are so particular in how they pattern our reactions to new acquaintances who are introduced to us as fellow professors. You sniff around the new person: what’s your discipline? what do you work on? what have you published? where did you go to graduate school? where have you taught? What sort of things do you teach anyway? Oh, you were a dean? And they usually sniff around in return. You try to get a sense of the other person’s basic approach to the life: highly proprietary? narrowly constrained to specifics? competitive or aggressive? critical, political? self-deprecating? sensitive, welcoming?
You do this partly because you’re trying to decide if this is a momentary encounter or if you’re going to attempt to enfold the new acquaintance in the outer reaches of your own maintained social network. But you’re also trying to find out if you overlap strongly in your interests or expertise—in some sense, if you should have known about this person already. And equally, you are (or should be) trying to make sure you show some respect for what this person knows in case the conversation drifts, in a friendly way, towards their expertise.
Sometimes you discover strange personal connections. I had a weird experience some years ago meeting another Africanist whose work is very simpatico with mine, whose scholarship I’d always loved, only for us to find out that we went to the same high school about two years apart and yet had no social overlaps despite that.
On the other hand, sometimes academics slip in sideways through your social and family networks and you don’t really have that highly patterned experience of sniffing around each other. That was John Adams, who I knew was a professor when I first met him and I knew a bit? something? of what he worked on, which was risk and transportation. That didn’t stop me at one point from talking about a book called Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt that I had read recently without fully processing that John’s research was a major influence on the book. He rather gently let that slip into the conversation, with his characteristic good humor. He also very gingerly revealed that his initial scholarly expertise on transportation was focused on West Africa, and his stories of his early travels there after his undergraduate experience have contributed some to the project I’m working on now. He also managed to let on that he’d been reading my blog and thought I was doing a pretty fair job of thinking through some important issues. (He also had a blog.)
Since that time, I’ve found myself more and more aware that my general take on expertise, complexity, uncertainty, risk management, and many other subjects has had me walking in his footsteps without really appreciating that I’d done so. Literally just before the time I first met him, I was deep in my initial involvement with an interdisciplinary faculty group here in the Philadelphia area that was studying complex systems, uncertainty, and emergence, almost exactly at the moment that John gave this 2007 talk at a conference devoted to those themes.
When someone you knew, respected, liked and valued dies, you think about their absence, and the impact that has on the people they were closest to. I think also with academics, you tend to think about their life’s work. In John’s case, the news pushed me to go really read up fully on his work—I’d previously tackled his 1995 synthesis Risk, and loved it, but I wanted a longer sense of his contributions. I hadn’t been very aware of the breadth of his life as a public intellectual, of the numerous times he was quoted in British news media or was interviewed, of the wide array of consultations and lectures he’d given, or the the length of time he’d been stirring up trouble and making contrarian (but carefully researched) arguments.
A number of days later, I wanted to assemble all of that reading into something more like a composed memorial essay. So here it is.
The social scientist John Adams once noted that risk was almost as much of a human preoccupation as sex. As he saw it, that meant risk was far too important to leave to the experts.
His scepticism about those experts notwithstanding, Adams became one of the predominant international scholars studying the concept of risk, steadily expanding the range of the concept’s meanings and implications. As a result, he became a regular fixture within British public life as a commentator and consultant.
The breadth of his knowledge and his willingness to have a go at almost any subject would be reckoned by many observers to be, well, quite risky for a practising academic, given the premium often put on narrow specialisation within many universities. In his own professional life, Adams was anything but carefully strategic or methodical.
Born in Toronto, Canada in 1938, Adams finished an undergraduate degree at the University of Western Ontario. Along with many other new Commonwealth graduates in the era of decolonization, Adams found himself teaching in a former colony, in this case Nigeria. This experience spurred him to return and take a Masters in Geography at Western Ontario, which then led him to Brazil and a study of the banana trade and its related transportation issues.
His subsequent doctoral thesis completed at the London School of Economics reconnected him with West Africa and deepened his study of roads, transport and traffic. Hired as a geographer at the University College London, the institution that he remained at for his entire academic career, Adams almost immediately established himself as a mischievous thinker when he published a short journal article in 1970 imagining Hyde Park as the site of a “fourth London airport”, receiving a public congratulations from a retired Air-Vice-Marshal who was a long-standing advocate of the same proposal. Adams had no desire to see planes landing in the heart of London: his only goal was to point out the absurdity of cost-benefit analysis in its usual form, a point he was to make repeatedly in the decades to follow. (He once termed it “Vogon economics”, referencing the work of a fellow Adams.)
Shortly thereafter, Adams began studying seat belts, which governments worldwide had begun to legally require car manufacturers to install. Adams came to the first but not last of his contrarian conclusions and argued that seat belts in fact made drivers and their passengers less safe overall, aligning with similar work by the economist Sam Peltzman. It was not that seat belts did not really protect people in cars involved in accidents–they did–but that this degree of protection changed the way drivers internally calculated their own risk, inspiring them to drive faster and less cautiously. Counter-intuitive though this argument seemed at first, changes in what Adams and other scholars like the psychologist Gerald J.S. Wilde termed a “risk thermostat” have become a central if still contested idea in research within the field of risk studies.
From that point, his canvas expanded. In time, he addressed how risk management and assessment addressed road safety generally, mad-cow disease, climate science, financial derivatives, environmental protection and many other subjects, inspiring the Institute for Risk Management to grant him a lifetime achievement award in 2014.
His 1995 book Risk brought his thinking on the overall concept together. As he frequently told his students and colleagues, “Risk management is not rocket science, it’s much more complex than that.” (Also the title of one of his essays.) He developed a beguiling synthesis that undergirded his persistent questioning of existing policies governing safety and risk reduction. Adams’ enthusiastic use of anthropology, sociology and psychology set him aside from researchers who stuck narrowly to quantitative analysis, but he also went deep into existing statistical datasets and models to find their flaws and complexities.
He came to think that popular beliefs and everyday thoughts about risk needed to be understood in their own terms rather than pre-emptively scolded as false or irrational. Adams argued that an “informal sector” of billions of ordinary people were engaged in assessing risk every day, and that for the most part, they came up with decisions that were as sensible–or more sensible–than experts who relentlessly looked to reduce risk via regulations and infrastructural safeguards.
He raised questions about the proper use of the “precautionary principle” in public policy, but also insisted on the importance of careful and serious research in approaching every single question of risk management, rather than relying on shoot-from-the-hip intuitions or fixed ideological precepts. Every aspect of human life, he argued, needed to be studied both for the specific ways that people felt about safety and the specific character of physical, economic and psychological danger it presented to people. However, he frequently returned to the central insight of his early seat belt research, pointing out that insulating people from consequences sometimes incentivized them to behave in even more catastrophically dangerous ways, an observation that he noted applied especially to the world of finance and investment in the early 21st Century.
His work on transport also led him to concern with what he called “hypermobility”, which he suggested was a case of “too much of a good thing”. He worried that the relentless expansion of the capacity of Britons to travel across considerable distances on a daily basis as well as to constantly relocate where they live was fueling an underlying crisis in social and political cohesion. “As we spread ourselves ever wider, we must spread ourselves thinner”, he observed in a 2001 lecture. What seems like greater freedom to move about, he argued, paradoxically makes us less happy, less connected, less safe and less free. This insight was fueled partly by his long-time opposition to the construction of new roadways in the Greater London region, an opposition he reinforced through a strong preference for travelling by bicycle.
One of his former students has remarked, “his style was light, his research was forensic, and his instincts were iconoclastic.” His friends, associates and students similarly observed that his good humour, clear and understandable explanations, and lack of dogmatism invariably made him a welcome presence in any conversation. The British news media and a wide variety of organisations that brought him on as a consultant or speaker agreed. He was marked in particular as one of a group of original and unpredictable thinkers on environmental protection policy that included Meyer Hillman, John Whitelegg and Stephen Plowden. He inspired many of his students to go into the field of risk studies, including Mike Croll, author of the recent book The Rise of Security.
He was married twice, having two children, Laura and Tom, with his first spouse Linda Pritchard. He married Lynn Foster in 2011, with whom he remained until his death in February of this year.
John Gordon Underwood Adams, academic and environmentalist, born 13 August 1938; died 27 February 2024