“Ergo, we will spend tens of billions to save future thousands, yet are reluctant to spend a few billion to save millions”.

I’m currently reading “Tall Tales about the Mind & Brain” — a collection of scientific essays (with many references to peer-reviewed papers) aimed at addressing society’s often erroneous take on Neuropsychology.

Our intuition often leads us to irrational  fear. Here are a few impressive statistics that I would like to share from a chapter called “The Powers and Perils of Intuition”, by David G. Myers:

The U.S. National Safety Council reports that from 2000 — 2002, Americans were, miles for mile, 39.5 times more likely to die in a vehicle crash than on a commercial flight… German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer confirms that the last 3 months of 2001 indeed produced 350 more American traffic fatalities than normal for those months. Long after 9/11, the terriorists were still killing us in ways unnoticed.

• Why do so many smokers fret before flying
• Why do we fear violent crime more than clogged arteries
• Why do we fear terrorism more than accidents — which kill nearly as many per week in just the USA as did worldwide terrorism in all of the 1990s
• Even with the horrific scale of 9/11, more Americans in 2001 died of food poisoning than terrorism

The above can be answered by psychological science, which has identified four influences on our intuitions about risk:

1. We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear (confinement and heights, therefore flying)
2. We fear what we cannot control (driving versus flying)
3. We fear what is immediate (smoking kills over 400,000 Americans per year, but not immediately)
4. We fear what is most readily available in memory (9/11 versus clogging of blood vessels)

My favourite part of this chapter comes at the very end, where Myers concludes by pointing out that we will spend “tens of billions to save future thousands, yet… reluctant to spend a few billion to save millions”.

Ten billion dollars a year:

• Would spare 29 million world citizens from developing AIDS by 2010, according to a joint report by representatives of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and others
• Spent converting cars to hybrid engines and constructing renewable energy sources could help avert the anticipated future catastrophe of global warming

One final thought: the cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, to date, exceeds $849-billion — it increases by the minute.