Blindness, Hype, and Danger

Can you spot the big, fat blazing irony here?

Time magazine is publishing a cover story about how Americans misperceive real risks and constantly worry about foolish things that, from a statistical standpoint, have almost zero chance of actually doing them harm. From the summary:

Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap.

"We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million," says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. "Now it's parts per billion."

At the same time, 20 percent of all adults still smoke; nearly 20 percent of drivers and more than 30 percent of backseat passengers don't use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese.

And where does this skewed perception of risk originate?

One answer is our faulty educational system, which places undue emphasis on cultural and social education to the detriment of math and science. Engineering jobs go overseas, American students lag behind other countries in basic math, and more and more college graduates are produced with degrees "in cinema" - with the final result being a population that lacks the facility to perform cogent, logical analysis about the real risks surrounding them, and prone to believe any dramatic claim.

Which leads us to the second answer - and the irony: The media, typified by publications like Time, has exploited the uninformed gullibility of Americans for decades. Shark attacks, DDT, random violence, ambiguous environmental dangers - items like these are the currency of breathless media freakouts when the news cycle is slow.

They often start with inconclusive lab results from funding-hungry researchers who can show faint correlations in the part-per-billion range - and they end in the neurotic minds of the average Soccer Mom who has catalogued yet another danger to the kids. Americans end up with a notion of risk that has been distorted, repeatedly, by wild inaccuracies. And the only people who profit along the way are litigious attorneys and the media companies who give these stories publicity in the first place.

Could we even be trusted to recognize real threats? Everyone from the apocalyptic environmentalist to the staunchest neocon answers "no" - but they're pleased to tell us what we really should be worrying about ...

Tags: Time Magazine