Whither risk assessment? An overall perspective

Major regulatory initiatives in health and safety are increasingly viewed as too costly, not objectively justified, and thus failing in their mandate to ensure a fair social distribution of rights and burdens. Official but arbitrary assumptions in cancer risk assessment and open-ended statutory language encourage regulatory agencies to overregulate. Also, institutional self-serving motivations of regulatory agencies add incentives to expand regulation. Mitigation of the current regulatory crisis may come from curbing these selfish incentives, and from requiring that regulation be justified on the basis of strict scientific standards of evidence, rather than on arbitrary assumptions and conjectures.