Let's say you find out how to make planes safer. You can cut fatalities in half or something. And let's say doing that will drive up the cost of air travel by $100/ticket. Well, you did a good job and saved X lives, but you ended up killing X+k people that stopped flying planes and started driving cars. So you did a good thing, you made planes safer and then you ended up killing people. It would be great if somehow everytime planes got safer we made cars more expensive, but I don't know how that would work.

Anyway, for some reason I thought about that reading this article and I figured how tremendously interesting risk-management must be in the medical device industry for the same types of reasons.