Posted on 08/11/2006 1:32:44 PM PDT by neverdem
Yesterday, British authorities broke up an alleged terror plot to blow up as many as ten commercial airliners as they flew to the United States. In response, the Department of Homeland Security upped the alert level on commercial flights from Britain to "red" and boosted the alert to "orange" for all other flights. In a completely unscientific poll, AOL asked subscribers: "Are you changing your travel plans because of the raised threat level?" At mid-afternoon about a quarter of the respondents had said yes. Such polls do reflect the kinds of anxieties terrorist attacks, even those that have been stymied, provoke in the public.
But how afraid should Americans be of terrorist attacks? Not very, as some quick comparisons with other risks that we regularly run in our daily lives indicate. Your odds of dying of a specific cause in any year are calculated by dividing that year's population by the number of deaths by that cause in that year. Your lifetime odds of dying of a particular cause are calculated by dividing the one-year odds by the life expectancy of a person born in that year. For example, in 2003 about 45,000 Americans died in motor accidents out of population of 291,000,000. So, according to the National Safety Council this means your one-year odds of dying in a car accident is about one out of 6500. Therefore your lifetime probability (6500 ÷ 78 years life expectancy) of dying in a motor accident are about one in 83.
What about your chances of dying in an airplane crash? A one-year risk of one in 400,000 and one in 5,000 lifetime risk. What about walking across the street? A one-year risk of one in 48,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 625. Drowning? A one-year risk of one in 88,000 and a one in 1100 lifetime risk. In a fire? About the same risk as drowning. Murder? A one-year risk of one in 16,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 210. What about falling? Essentially the same as being murdered. And the proverbial being struck by lightning? A one-year risk of one in 6.2 million and a lifetime risk of one in 80,000. And what is the risk that you will die of a catastrophic asteroid strike? In 1994, astronomers calculated that the chance was one in 20,000. However, as they've gathered more data on the orbits of near earth objects, the lifetime risk has been reduced to one in 200,000 or more.
So how do these common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of plausible scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America's 40,000 shopping malls per week, your chances of being there at the wrong time would be about one in one million or more. Rothschild also estimated that if terrorists hijacked and crashed one of America's 18,000 commercial flights per week that your chance of being on the crashed plane would be one in 135,000.
Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.
So do these numbers comfort you? If not, that's a problem. Already, security measures—pervasive ID checkpoints, metal detectors, and phalanxes of security guards—increasingly clot the pathways of our public lives. It's easy to overreact when an atrocity takes place—to heed those who promise safety if only we will give the authorities the "tools" they want by surrendering to them some of our liberty. As President Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural speech said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn't matter—because it doesn't really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.
Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent.
Probably what the Lebonese thought before Hussein kicked the PLO terrorist types out of Jordan in 1970. Heck, they only beheaded a couple of Jordian soldiers. Chances were small they'd do it to you.
Bloody war ensued and terrorists went to Lebanon. So Lebanon is Lebanon and Jordianians have relatively peaceful life. Hussein almost waited too long. Fighting was reportedly bloody.
http://www.cedarland.org/black.html for a start on history.
However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn't matter—because it doesn't really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.
The gist of the column was that modern liberalism has no answers to the pressing problems of the day, so the practitioners have withdrawn to the small, insignificant issues. They don't want to deal with terrorism, but they can handle a smoking ordinance. There may be a guy with a bomb belt waiting to blow you up, but we're going to make sure the lawn's mowed. I think this article is a perfect illustration of Mr. Steyn's brilliant essay.
Like I say, neoliberalism is a mental disorder.
September 10th all over again.
#1 - Terrorism is just one facet of Islamic war. They will shift to regular warfare once they believe they have the strength. Are all the victims of pogroms, those who wandered into Muslim "no-go" areas and were never seen again, the victims of the Sudanese genocide and the savage riots from Aceh to Algeria counted in their figures? I don't think so. I doubt they even have figured in the dead from the Jewish center just two weeks back, because it - like so many other such incidents - have politically-correctly not been classified as the terrorist incidents they are.
#2 - There are more casualties than just the dead. Often the wounded wish they were dead. Do these count?
#3 - Does the fact that an enemy is effectively imposing restrictions on the way we live by forcing us to adopt these security measures factor into this at all?
#4 - There is no way to reduce your exposure to terrorism without also reducing your freedom. On the other hand, you can reduce your exposure to crime by owning a gun and learning how to use it; reduce your exposure to highway accidents by driving carefully and soberly, and so on. Terrorism you can only reduce your exposure by being dead or hiding in a cave.
I could go on, but this article is such nonsense it's not worth it.
Oh, and I should add, for the odds being so damned small, how is it that I personally have been twice attacked by these allegedly low-odds terrorists? Oh yeah, I worked in the World Trade Center. I guess we'll all just have to abandon anything prominent that may get targeted... keep our heads down... not make waves... maybe a burkha would help. I've got it! We can all convert to Islam and then they won't want to kill us anymore!
What is always ignored in mentioning auto fatality stats is that your chances of being in an accident are a lot less if you are not a drinker, an old incompetent driver, or a young adult especially a young male.
What people do not realize is that the hyperventilating and over-reaction can often ultimately kill more Americans than an appropriately measured response. As long as the deaths do not happen all at once in one place, humans do not notice the far higher death tolls. I see that the cynics have not overestimated the human capacity for irrationality.
Gut reactions are usually irrational, incorrect, and frequently cause far more damage than necessary. People here are very clearly conflating feeling safe with being safe and are willing to pay any price (no matter how irrational) for the former.
Yo, Ron baby! Can you calculate the odds of you making it to the end of the block waving an American flag and yelling, "Long live Bush, death to al Qaeda" in the middle of Iran?
This is a very poorly reasoned article. Yes, it is true the the odds of being killed by a terrorist are more remote than meeting one's demise in other ways, but it doesn't follow that we should do nothing to head off terrorist actions. As we saw yesterday, there are individuals who are quite dedicated to making sure that the odds catch up with as many people as possible.
I was out there yesterday, flying home from Philadelphia. Not for a moment did I feel fear. The authorities are at work doing what they can to make us safe. They caught up with yesterday's perpetrators, after all, as they have caught up with others. They can do more, and hopefully they will. But mainly, my lack of fear is based on my belief that when my number is up, my number is up, and there is little--probably nothing -- I can do about it. I don't take unnecessary risks. But I live my life and I go about my business as I would if there were no such thing as a terrorist. Part of that involves getting on a commercial airliner from time to time or going into high target-value public places. If, one of these days, I go down, I'm going down standing up.
I disagree. Although you are correct, as is the author of the article, on the basis of a static calculation, i.e. comparing terror murders to accidental deaths, you both are very wrong to use a static calculation.
As other posters have tried to point out, the number of terror attacks is not a static quantity but highly coupled to our reactions. Bin Laden himself said he was emboldened by our pre 9/11 reactions. So WWII as a reaction to Pearl Harbor is the same logic we use when we "over" react to a few cases of plague by mobilizing the CDC, and an army of local authorities.
More importantly, our reaction to terrorism is not a simple calculation. It has a strong moral component. This is analogous to a crime victim using more resources than were lost in the crime to bring the perp to justice. We do this sort of thing all the time and its non-mathematical purpose is to create a moral climate around us that says, "don't tread on me."
Finally, humans do many things that do not seem logical until analyzed more deeply. Two cave men were walking along when one was killed and eaten by a saber-tooth cat. Even though they had not seen this sort of beast before, the survivor did not say, "Well, it would be illogical for me to conclude, based upon just one anecdotal incident that this cat is dangerous to me. The attack may be an anomaly. More statistics would be necessary before I could draw a conclusion regarding the nature of the beast." Instead, the survivor decided he better not get close to saber-toothed cats.
OK, this guy has a point as far as it's being stupid to lock yourself in your house on account of terrorism. We all do have to continue leading our lives. That does not mean, however, that our country shouldn't be vigilant about terrorism. The chances that I personally shall be killed by a drunk driver over the next, say, month are low, but that doesn't mean that law enforcement should start giving drunk drivers a pass. The reason we need a strong defense is so that we CAN continue to lead our normal lives!
the other moronic thing about this analysis is major terrorist attacks can devastate the economy, so it STILL affects you
I not so much scared for my personal safety or that of my family.
What I'm concerned about is the fate of our country as a whole, and the near total annihilation it appears we'll need to suffer to get a good 3/4 of the country to Wake the F Up as to what's really going down. :(
I don't get it. Lefties think we should just shrug off the all the decades of deaths from terrorist attacks because we're just overreacting to the threat. So why then are they so unnaturally obsessed with the deaths of our military in the WAIF?
Isn't it hilarious that he plies us with all sorts of statistics explaining how we're all in more danger taking a bath, etc. In my experience, folks who take this line of reasoning w/ statistics and such, won't be particularly useful in any sort of crisis, whether mass murder or changing a tire.
“Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 … your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300.”
Although educated, I am not a statistician. But to me that means that in my town of Decatur, Illinois aprox. pop 80,000 that means 61 people will die from terrorist attacks sometime in their lifetime… hmmm… somehow I cant just lean back and find that comforting…
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