[blagie]

My suggestion would be to travel the world, and see how people live in places with different margins. Life is sort of okay. Look at Soviet-era Eastern Europe, India, the diverse approaches across Africa, China, the rest of Asia, etc.

People get by. There isn't a sudden collapse or implosion.

It's also easy-to-manage. If there are suddenly a lot of electrical fires, regulators will step in before it goes out-of-control.

For my personal tastes, the US is too liability and safety-conscious on a day-to-day level, and not nearly safety-conscious enough on a system level. Risks like fires, where I live, are small enough that I'm not worried about them.

Antibiotic-resistant super-diseases? AI apocalypse? Thermonuclear war? Cyber-Armageddon (where every network-connected device is maximally bricked in the span of 30 seconds)? Climate change? Some weird super-pollutant? Systemic economic collapse? Civil war? Genetically-engineered super-bug? Running out of water in Arizona (or your other local issue)? ...

We have major disasters typically around once a century in any given location (WWI/WWII/30 years war/Bubonic Plaque/hurricane/etc.). It's hard to predict which one will happen; some are very unlikely, and some are pretty likely. If something hasn't happened in 50+ years, we stop worrying about it, and we completely ignore future previously-impossible risks.

I'm much more worried by those sorts of things than by fire safety.