21.1: Life is Full of Risks

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Nothing will be quite the same after September 11, 2001, and that certainly includes how we think about risk. One moment things were fine, the next moment disaster struck. Indeed, the bulk of the revisions to this edition of the text were completed during the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 16 and a half million had people contracted the virus and more than 650,000 of them died by the time we finished editing, at the end of July 2020 (who knows what the final numbers will be, as the numbers shows no sign of slowing). People lost their jobs, and as a result, their homes and cars. People already living on the margins became homeless.

It was a sobering reminder of how risky life can be and of how little, sometimes, we can do to avoid those risks. But these tragic consequences also emphasize the importance of doing what we can to avoid life’s dangers and mitigate harm when risk is unavoidable. In this chapter, we will learn how to distinguish the big risks from the small ones, and we will develop some tools for thinking about risks.

Everything involves some risk. Even if you stay home in bed with the covers pulled up tight, accidents can still befall you. Every year, thousands of people are taken to emergency rooms after falling out of bed. Some risks are serious, and we should take precautions to avoid them. Other risks are overblown, and we just make ourselves miserable if we dwell on them. The trick is to learn how to tell the difference.

Before proceeding, take the following pretest. Indicate which of the two items on each row you think causes more deaths in America each year; you might also indicate how much more likely you think one is than another (answers are given at the end of the chapter).

There are many sorts of risks: health risks (“Is rabies really a danger?”), physical risks (“Is skydiving more dangerous than rock climbing?”) job risks (“What are the chances that a new restaurant will go under within the first year?”), financial risks (“What if I buy stock in a company that goes bankrupt?), crime risks (“What are the chances my car will be stolen?”), social risks (“Will I be a social outcast if I tell people what I really think about gun control?”), sexual risks (“How reliable are condoms?”), environmental risks (“How real is the threat of global warming?”). You name it, and there’s a risk involved.

We will touch on various sorts of risks, but to keep things manageable we will focus on causes of death and types of crime, with a bit on some other risks you encounter frequently. But the tools we develop for thinking about these types of risks apply equally to all the other types of risk.