"Where there is a problem, the risks to the public are greater than they've ever been before"
About this Quote
Dan Glickman captures a defining feature of modern life: when something goes wrong, more people are exposed, faster, and with wider consequences. As a former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and later a leader in media and public policy, he saw how scale, speed, and interconnected systems transform a localized defect into a public crisis. Food production is an obvious case. Centralized processing, just-in-time logistics, and global supply chains have made diets safer in many respects, yet they have also amplified the stakes. A single contamination event can spread across states or continents before it is detected, turning what might once have been a local illness cluster into a national recall.
The same logic applies beyond food. Digital networks allow information and services to flow instantly, but a vulnerability in software or a lapse in data protection can affect millions at once. Financial markets, supply chains, public health, and even cultural distribution systems share this property: efficiency and reach magnify both benefits and harms. Glickman is not simply invoking fear; he is describing a structural shift in risk. Probability may fall for any given unit of activity, but the potential impact of rare failures climbs because the system binds us together.
The lesson is governance-oriented. Inspection, traceability, and rapid response capacity must be scaled to match the systems they oversee. International standards matter because problems no longer respect borders. Transparency and honest risk communication become essential to sustain public trust when failures do occur. There is also a moral dimension: institutions that profit from interconnectedness assume a duty to anticipate and mitigate systemic harms.
Progress has not made society fragile by default, but it has made negligence more costly. Glickman points to a responsibility that grows with complexity: to invest in foresight, redundancy, and accountability so that when problems arise, they do not become public disasters.
The same logic applies beyond food. Digital networks allow information and services to flow instantly, but a vulnerability in software or a lapse in data protection can affect millions at once. Financial markets, supply chains, public health, and even cultural distribution systems share this property: efficiency and reach magnify both benefits and harms. Glickman is not simply invoking fear; he is describing a structural shift in risk. Probability may fall for any given unit of activity, but the potential impact of rare failures climbs because the system binds us together.
The lesson is governance-oriented. Inspection, traceability, and rapid response capacity must be scaled to match the systems they oversee. International standards matter because problems no longer respect borders. Transparency and honest risk communication become essential to sustain public trust when failures do occur. There is also a moral dimension: institutions that profit from interconnectedness assume a duty to anticipate and mitigate systemic harms.
Progress has not made society fragile by default, but it has made negligence more costly. Glickman points to a responsibility that grows with complexity: to invest in foresight, redundancy, and accountability so that when problems arise, they do not become public disasters.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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