ANYBODY who dabbles in transatlantic affairs has come across one giant stereotype: Americans admire risk-takers, whereas Europeans (at least in the rich, stable parts of the continent) are instinctively risk-averse, expecting the state to shield them from all sorts of dangers, including their own folly. Move a bit farther east to the ex-communist world, especially Russia, and you enter a place where things seem to have gone from one extreme to another: from an all-demanding, all-protective state to a free-for-all where life is full of deadly dangers, about which even the prudent can't do very much.

Like most windy generalisations, this transatlantic contrast has a grain of truth. Americans have embraced the fruits of biotechnology—in the form of foods based on genetically modified organisms—but Europeans see them as too dangerous for consumers and the environment. Even in the quietest American suburb, the rhetoric of the frontier is never entirely absent: people are expected to take responsibility for the security of their own homes (by shooting burglars), for their health and their financial future, in the knowledge that catastrophe looms if they make the wrong calls. A high rate of bankruptcy is seen in America as a sign of a healthy economy—and not, as Europeans often feel, as a threat to social peace. Americans are willing to invest in start-up companies or new financial products; the proverbial Belgian dentist prefers government bonds. It all flows, says Charles Kupchan, a Europe-watcher at America's Georgetown University, from the fact that American culture is more libertarian, whereas that of Europe is more communitarian.

This contrast may have more to do with rhetoric and self-image than with real life. In the regulation of car engines, for example, America took the virtuous step of mandating catalytic converters long before the European Union did. But in the (western) European climate, officious regulators have an easier time: people are more receptive to the idea that government should care for them. In America, demands for more regulation (of the internet, or air quality, say) have often been presented as calls to protect children; it's assumed that adults can fend for themselves.

On either side of the Atlantic, of course, the regulator's zeal can suddenly increase after an unforeseen event. The licensing of medicine by America's Food and Drug Administration has become slower since 2004 when a pain-killer, Vioxx, was withdrawn by its maker, Merck, because it increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes. But in America's regulation wars, there will always be lots of people who point out that caution can also cost lives. Psychologically at least, Europe is an easier place to make the case for being careful.

In any case, by comparison with most other parts of the world, and with any other era of human history, the United States and western Europe are converging in their attitudes to danger. Most kinds of risk have been successfully removed from everyday life. Women hardly ever die in childbirth; miners generally make it back above ground; fishermen usually return to shore; and having a drink of water no longer means dicing with cholera. Of course, some people—bungee-jumpers and rock-climbers—take risks freely; but the unwanted perils that once haunted people's lives are mostly a thing of the past.

What Americans and Europeans alike are now attempting to do is squeeze out the last few drops of risk, with results that are often counter-productive, because risk is simply transferred from one place to another. That is true in an obvious sense when, for example, companies dump toxic waste or use risky technologies in countries whose regulation is relatively lax. But there are also more subtle ways in which efforts to eliminate risk can simply move the danger along. Some good instances come from behaviour on the roads, where people may act more recklessly as safety measures (their own and other people's) make them bolder.

In one experiment, a British psychologist, Ian Walker of Bath University, simply got on his bicycle and monitored the behaviour of 2,300 vehicles that overtook him. When he wore a helmet, drivers were much more likely to zoom past him with little room to spare; when he was bare-headed (and indeed when he wore a female wig) the amount of space that motorists left would increase. An experiment in Munich found that the drivers of taxicabs fitted with anti-lock braking systems were involved in no fewer accidents than those without. That is because the former used those superior brakes not to practise prudence but to drive more aggressively.

Such unintended effects are not confined to Europe. John Adams, a transport expert at University College London, has compiled data from all over the world to show that laws making drivers wear seatbelts do not make roads safer; they move deaths from inside cars to outside them because they encourage bad driving. The number of young children killed on the roads has fallen in recent years, he notes—but mainly because they are rarely allowed out alone, so today's teenagers have less skill at navigating hazardous roads; and as a result, the number of teenagers killed in car accidents has jumped. He lauds the Dutch experiment in “naked streets” where most road signs and markings were removed to force travellers to keep their wits about them.

Where America and Europe may differ is in the main cause of their risk-reducing zeal. America's proverbially litigious culture makes all players in the public arena, be they government agencies, companies or schools, intensely keen to delimit their responsibilities, and within those limits to minimise the risk of liability. To many Europeans, an “ambulance-chasing” legal environment, which sees every mishap as an opportunity for a lawsuit, is an unwelcome pathology that has spread in their direction from the United States.

But Europe has pathologies of its own, especially that of the over-ambitious bureaucracy, such as the European Union agencies that regulate food and the environment. In the wilder fringes of the EU there are citizens who understandably trust the Brussels mandarins to monitor their beaches and air more fairly than their own country's bureaucrats ever would. So regulatory zeal becomes a source of legitimacy for EU institutions that badly need it.

Mission creep is not peculiar to Brussels. All bureaucracies are keen to survive and, if possible, grow. For survival, it is useful to estimate the level of the risks they are supposed to manage at close to, but not quite, zero. Higher and the institution may be regarded as failing; lower and it may be regarded as unnecessary. And growth can be achieved by bringing more risks within their remit. Britain's Food Standards Agency, for example, has decided to target not only the traditional problems of contamination by microbes or poisons, but what it calls the “downstream risks” of food: what people choose to eat. The agency is now introducing a food-labelling scheme with what its chairman, Dame Deirdre Hutton, says is the “absolutely intended consequence of getting manufacturers to change their products”. This reflects a mentality that refuses to see the overweight as fallible gluttons: now they are victims facing a risk which the government has a solemn duty to abate.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the net result is the same: a huge risk-avoidance endeavour which reflects the illusion that everyday life can be made almost perfectly safe. Whenever something bad happens—a child has an accident on a school trip; a window-cleaner falls off a ladder—the immediate call is for something to be done, and if the state doesn't oblige, lawyers will. Discontent with this state of affairs is no monopoly of the rugged American: some Europeans are worried too. Nils Brunsson, a professor of management at the Stockholm School of Economics, says muddled ideas about risk and regulation need correction by a third R: responsibility. “If you want responsibility, you take decisions,” he says. “If you don't, you get others to make decisions, and then say you had no choice.”

Some people, of course, find cruder and less rational ways of protesting against the search for a risk-free life. All over the rich world, there are parents who leave the child-proof lids off medicines because they find them so fiddly, and office workers so irritated by self-closing fire doors that they prop them open.

But those cultural differences persist. Americans who move to western Europe are often dismayed by a mentality that seems wary of technological or social innovation: they sense a resistance to “rocking the boat” by any actions whose effects are unpredictable. Europeans who settle in the United States are at once frightened and exhilarated by a place where people may yearn for a life free of risk (inside gated communities, for example) but know in their hearts they can never get it.

At the same time, both those shocks are mild compared to the one experienced by Westerners who move to Russia—and find themselves in a place where life is so full of lethal danger that some people see little point in reducing risk at the margins: a world of gaping pot-holes, tipsy ambulance-drivers and melting icicles which hang from ledges like daggers. The idea of regulators caring for the public in an accountable way, or of courts where a humble citizen can seek redress, would sound naive to many Russians. In a land where life expectancy (at 59 for males, lower than in Guatemala or Bangladesh) is lamentably short, people apparently see little value in driving slowly, or in cutting down on alcohol or tobacco.

Raw political power and/or hard cash are assumed to trump every other kind of authority, including the courts. But that does not mean that Russians are totally irrational in their choices. Individuals or firms that openly flout the law may do so in the well-founded belief that they are too powerful for the law to touch them. If people are prudent enough to settle their debts, it is not through fear of prosecution, but because much more unpleasant forms of private revenge may be in store. And as Mark Kirsh, a British lawyer in Moscow, points out, Russians are making a logical calculation when they rely more on friends than on state agencies or courts.

Few Americans or west Europeans would trade their relatively risk-free existence for the tingling dice with death that can go with daily life in Russia. But many would endorse the insistence of the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, on the sanctity of the right to incur danger: “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.” Being reckless from time to time preserves what is “most precious and most important—that is, our personality, our individuality.”