Wolf – Warning Weariness, Part IV

On November 23 I posted about a book suggesting that concerns about Avian flu were reminders of Aesop's fable about the boy who cried wolf. In this morning's WaPo writer Linton Weeks writes about the national tendency to panic in Fear Factory. Some extracts:

This is a land in lockdown. Seventy years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the country: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Today, we are told to fear everything but fear itself, which we embrace with widespread arms, outstretched hands and an open wallet. We treat fear like Caesar victorious. We allow fear into our homes, our heads, our hearts. We build whole industries around it.

Let's admit it: We are living in Fraidy Cat Nation.

Here is the "money"quote - in more senses that one:

Tom Finnigan of Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), puts it this way: "Humans have a tendency to overestimate small risks while underestimating big risks, and politicians and special interests are very good at taking advantage of it."

The world is a dangerous place -- and it became even more so in the wake of 9/11 -- but it couldn't possibly be as treacherous, as dastardly, as booby-trapped as the government and the corporations and the media would have us believe.

I don't think that the problem is that we underestimate big risks. Everybody knew what a Category Five Hurricane would do to New Orleans. Hurricane preparation would have been expensive and would have required several politicians to give up their federal pork. They didn't underestimate the big risk, they just estimated the cost of dealing with it and preferred to exist in a state of denial. Maybe that is underestimating.

The challenge is that we are always hearing cries of wolf. We hear that the wolf is coming in the form of global warming, Avian flu, a Social security crises, terrorist attack with WMD, environmental pollution, etc. Politicians gain votes by scaring us into preventing crises that may, or may not, come. Journalists, who could help by critically evaluating these claims, are all too prone to headlines warning of the next wolf. Then, when the wolf does come, they are write stories about how their warnings were ignored.

I'm not sure of the answer, but I suggest that we treat each warning with some skepticism. If we can avoid overestimating some of the minor risks, maybe we can mobilize the resources necessary to deal with the big risks - obesity, drugs, tobacco, and poor schooling would be a good start.