The True Risk of Terrorism


Abstract:
Getting the statistics.

Body:
Humans are bad natural statisticians. Even after years of training in a field, such as medicine, people regularly make glaring errors in reasoning about statistics and probabilities, such as believing a biopsy will have a greater effect than it actually will upon predicting cancer. I wrote previously about how US soldiers in Iraq are safer than civilians at home, and in that vein the CATO institute has released a report detailing the true risks of terrorism, providing a comparative analysis similar to my own.

This kind of comparative statistical analysis is the common sense needed in discussions of world problems. I'm much more concerned with hunger and vehicle accidents, which kill billions of people, and existential risks, which have a small but growing probability of killing everyone, than I am terrorism, which has a small probability of killing a few people. When we further consider the costs in civil liberties and money to stop terrorism, it seems hardly worthwhile, whereas the costs of saving people from hunger and vehicle accidents are much smaller and would have a larger payoff: the money to stop terrorists from killing one person could, in my estimate, feed at least several hundred people, if not more.

Terrorism is a problem that must be addressed, but we should remember the relative and absolute value of our efforts.

Posted: Tue - August 8, 2006 at 03:18 PM         |    

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