JackFlorey
100 kW
That law is very similar to Booth's Law - a law in skydiving that states that the safer skydiving gear becomes, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant. And while there is some truth to that, overall the skydiving fatality rate has gone down dramatically over the past 60 years.Shallow, brief address of the issues, but you don't have to trust me because I didn't write it.
In addition, when you look at fatality rates, you can see step changes where better/safer gear is introduced. Around 1980, fatality rates dropped from 4 per 100,000 jumps to under 2. This was driven by the fairly rapid switch from round military-surplus canopies with minimal reefing, to modern ram-air parachutes with pilot chutes and a reefing system. The next big jump happened around 1990, when AAD's (automatic activation devices) became common; the rate went from about 1.8 to 1.
For all those jumps, of course, there were people who died specifically because (for example) they figured they didn't have to make 100% sure they pulled; they knew they had an AAD to back them up if they didn't. I witnessed a few of them. But overall they made the sport safer.
So I don't buy the blanket assumption that safer gear always makes people take a proportionately higher risk. Booth's law, for example, isn't valid even in the industry he is describing (skydiving.)