Free Republic

Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. A look at why the tough guys win more than they should. ...Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics. For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent...

...Americans had good reason for not wanting the cost of private precautions against terrorism to become a giant tax on the economy out of rational proportion to the threat. See what this has done in the sad exceptional case of the airlines: Security hassles have made flying even more of a drag while piling up costly overhead on struggling carriers. But the last thing we need is to subsidize a similar indifference to natural disasters.... You would be rightly surprised to learn that normally disputatious climate scientists are in considerable agreement about the growing destructiveness of hurricanes seen over the...