The statistics of fear

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My mom is always worried about her two sons who live on the opposite side of the nation from her. Before cell phones were common I would return home to find messages like the following on my answering machine (I am paraphrasing):

“Abhi, beta. Please tell me that you aren’t eating beef. You will get Mad Cow disease, you will become a vegetable, then you will die.”

After hearing this message on half a dozen occasions I pretty much gave up beef. Why? Because this is how the messages usually ended:

“Promise me beta, ok, love mom, bye.”

Or what about this more recent one on my cell phone:

“Abhi, I heard there are fires all around Los Angeles, be careful, stay away from the hills.” [note: I am nowhere near the hills]

My favorite to date has been:

“Abhi, do you drink water out of plastic bottles that you re-fill? The plastic leaks chemicals into the water. You will die.”

Since the World Trade Center attacks and the terrorist attacks that have followed in other parts of the world (like the recent Mumbai Train attacks), many people have established a new dichotomy in their minds. There was before 9/11 and there is after 9/11. “Everything is different now.” I find such sentiments bordering on delusional but until now I have had no really substantial counter-argument to point to that was any more cogent than me calling the person an “idiot” . That changed this week when John Mueller of Ohio State University published this paper for the Libertarian Cato Institute. Titled, “A False Sense of Insecurity?“ the paper takes a look at how ignorance of statistics allows entities (or my mother) to use fear inappropriately. This article (only five pages) is a must read and something I wish every American was exposed to.

For all the attention it evokes, terrorism actually causes rather little damage and the likelihood that any individual will become a victim in most places is microscopic. Those adept at hyperbole like to proclaim that we live in “the age of terror.” However, while obviously deeply tragic for those directly involved, the number of people worldwide who die as a result of international terrorism is generally only a few hundred a year, tiny compared to the numbers who die in most civil wars or from automobile accidents. In fact, in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.

Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

But what about nuclear weapons or other Doomsday scenarios? What if the terrorists get there hands on the really bad stuff that they didn’t have before?

Obviously, this condition could change if international terrorists are able to assemble sufficient weaponry or devise new tactics to kill masses of people, and if they come to do so routinely. That, of course, is the central fear. As during the Cold War, commentators are adept at spinning out elaborate doomsday and worst-case scenarios. However, although not impossible, it would take massive efforts and even more stupendous luck for terrorists regularly to visit substantial destruction upon the United States…

To this point in history, biological weapons have killed almost no one. And the notion that large numbers of people would perish if a small number of chemical weapons were to be set off is highly questionable. Although they can be hugely lethal when released in gas chambers, their effectiveness as weapons has been unimpressive. In World War I, for example, chemical weapons caused less than one percent of the total combat deaths; on average, it took a ton of gas to produce one fatality. In the conclusion to the official British history of the war, chemical weapons are relegated to a footnote that asserts that gas “made war uncomfortable…to no purpose.” A 1993 analysis by the Office of Technology Assessment finds that a terrorist would have to deliver a full ton of Sarin nerve gas perfectly and under absolutely ideal conditions over a heavily populated area to cause between 3,000 and 8,000 deaths — something that would require the near-simultaneous detonation of dozens, even hundreds, of weapons. Under slightly less ideal circumstances — if there were a moderate wind or if the sun were out, for example — the death rate would be only one-tenth as great.

From day one the government has followed a strategy that seeks to cover their liability in case of another attack. Part of the way to do this is to keep people in fear so that if something goes wrong they can be ready with the “I told you so,” instead of making more logical, statistics-based changes.

The shock and tragedy of September 11 does demand a focused and dedicated program to confront international terrorism and to attempt to prevent a repeat. But it seems sensible to suggest that part of this reaction should include an effort by politicians, officials, and the media to inform the public reasonably and realistically about the terrorist context instead of playing into the hands of terrorists by frightening the public. What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing, coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central question: “How worried should I be?” Instead, the message the nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put (or caricatured) it, “Be scared; be very, very scared — but go on with your lives.” Such messages have led many people to develop what Leif Wenar of the University of Sheffield has aptly labeled “a false sense of insecurity.”

The paper goes on to pose three questions that should be part of any probability risk assessment used to help determine the best way to defend ourselves against terrorism:

  • How much should we be willing to pay for a small reduction in probabilities that are already extremely low?
  • How much should we be willing to pay for actions that are primarily reassuring but do little to change the actual risk?
  • How can measures such as strengthening the public health system, which provide much broader benefits than those against terrorism, get the attention they deserve?

And finally the political dimension:

There is no reason to suspect that President Bush’s concern about terrorism is anything but genuine. However, his approval rating did receive the greatest boost for any president in history in September 2001, and it would be politically unnatural for him not to notice. His chief political adviser, Karl Rove, declared last year that the “war” against terrorism will be central to Bush’s reelection campaign. The Democrats, scurrying to keep up, have stumbled all over each other with plans to expend even more of the federal budget on the terrorist threat, such as it is, than President Bush.

This process is hardly new. The preoccupation of the media and of Jimmy Carter’s presidency with the hostages taken by Iran in 1979 to the exclusion of almost everything else may look foolish in retrospect, as Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, conceded in his memoirs. But it doubtless appeared to be good politics at the time — Carter’s dismal approval rating soared when the hostages were seized. Similarly, in the 1980s the Reagan administration became fixated on a handful of American hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon. At the time, Reagan’s normally judicious secretary of state, George Shultz, was screaming that we needed desperately to blast somebody somewhere “on a moment’s notice” — even without adequate evidence — in order to avoid looking like the indecisive “Hamlet of nations.” He apparently preferred the King Lear approach. Normally, however, only lunatics and children rail at storms; sensible people invest in umbrellas and lightning rods.

Stop reading my post already. Just go read the whole paper. I can’t wait until my mom calls me tonight. Armed with the correct statistics I shall win the argument for once.

65 thoughts on “The statistics of fear”

  1. There is enough nuclear material/ fuel stolen or unaccounted for (like, former Soviet Union Republics) to make a few dirty bombs. That Princeton guy was a PhD student in doldrums not an undergrad, and he did show that making just a thermonuclear bomb is pretty easy.

    Millions of dollars are required only for making weapons-grade nuclear bombs with a robust delivery system and fuel supply. That is another ball-game.

    In subconscious level, we do probablistic analysis when we cross a street obeying/ disobeying traffic lights.

  2. Abhi: I was laughing in the background, while you were having that conversation regarding Niles type Virus (in Idaho and few other Western and Mountain States), with your mom just few minutes ago. I think the mainstream media always have some tantalizing topics and try to scare general public with absolutely baseless tidbits. Yo Mom, in-between flipping channels from “Tumhari Disha” and “Sindoor Tere Naam Ka” and God knows what else? just catches few words here and there and calls you and your brother to caution – purely due to love and concern – As other readers substantiate similar behavior by their Moms, she is not the only one who may be paranoid. Being in the NUCLEAR industry for 37 some odd years, and someone who have performed scores of “Probabilistic”, as well as “Deterministic” analysis, I can talk about these things for ever. However, may be some other time. It is almost 2100, and as you know well past my bedtime!…..Love..Dad

  3. accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

    Deer and peanuts are mad dangerous.

    Also, anyone else think it’s hilarious how parents end voicemail messages (or, um blog posts) with “love, mom” like they’re letters?

  4. maybe i was y’all’s age when i last penned something called ‘statistics of fear’. fresh out of grad school, full of beans, i vented on some article that i thought propagated poor science. i still had it in an old folder so thought i’d share some relevant excerpts.

    (railing against…) The sensationalist articles on health-related issues appearing in popular media … To illustrate, I will dismantle a representative (but fictitious) article – “Study: Eating sugar beets increases risk for colon cancer” – to highlight possible gaps between the research and the reported news. The strident tone of the headline leads one to believe that the research has discovered an inviolate truth. Digging deeper, one finds the researchers used some thirty people in their study and that their conclusion was based on deviation of the beet eaters from the non-beet eaters in a certain physiological change associated with colon cancer. The first issue one takes with the reporting is that, at best, the study showed a link between beet consumption and the development of a physiological change that has been correlated to colon cancer – this is distinct from a cause and effect relationship. The second issue is that thirty people are not representative of a couple of billion people around the globe. Exploratory research can not be reported as a lifestyle-altering profundity. In a broader sense, research that bases conclusions on anthropometric measurements and physical appearances fail in the same respects and are junk science. Returning to the beet eaters, another flaw in the interpretation of such research is that the associated “risk” is spread uniformly across the entire population that fits the test criteria. To paraphrase, if there were 10% more people in the beet eating group who developed (say) peculiar growths 10cm in size, the results can not be interpreted as, “everyone who eats beets will develop abnormalities, albeit growths that are only 1cm long”. Indeed the blame can not be cast upon the journalists alone. The responsibility for accurate news reports rests with the scientists as well. Your example of the researcher who kept discarding his rats until his results suited his hypothesis is a case in point. The inherent flaw with the method of hypothesis testing is that one needs to frame an interesting hypothesis before conducting the experiment. I conjecture that it is the need to justify the investment of time and money that leads otherwise scrupulous scientists to bias their research.

  5. Operational risk quantifiers use tail estimates on large sets of events to characterize the loss due to terrorism etc. I know a few people in and around the Northeast that work in these areas — mostly for banks and large insurers. The point of the exercise though, in most such cases, is merely to find out how bad things might get in the event of something catastrophic (including the avian flu). Only recently have people begun looking at how transnational supply chains can be modified (or made more robust) to prevent supply shortages in critical situations.

    Academically inclined minds might want to check out Dick Larson’s page at MIT to know more about the latest in disaster management. An interesting related article from MIT again was by Yossi Sheffi on evacuation and emergency logistics in the context of the bombings in southern Lebanon.

    However, note that none of these approaches actually look at “ways” to mitigate the cause itself. Well, to be honest, that is perhaps beyond the ambit of a mere operations researcher.

  6. I am yet to see a good blue print on how to detect independent cells of the Madrid, London bombers type.

    Very difficult in the case of the latter, although there have been ongoing efforts by the British security services and I believe 3 post-7/7 attacks have been foiled. There is also a trial of 7 British-born wannabe jihadists underway in London as you may be aware — they wanted to blow up nightclubs, attack energy grids etc.

    The problem is that a virulently anti-Western mentality is not necessarily being encouraged within mosques in the West (apart from examples such as Finsbury Mosque) but “backroom” cells — basically ordinary people watching jihadist propaganda videos in other people’s houses etc. Apart from secretly monitoring communication between such people (bugging cars/homes, observing jihadis internet chatrooms etc) and tracking travel to and from Pakistan and the Middle East, actively monitoring and predicting potential terrorists is like trying to “track” and predict racism. It’s the ideology which is the primary problem, perpetuated extensively by “regular folk”. The fact that many older-generation Muslims (indeed, older-generation South Asians in general) have such a virulently anti-Western and (with regards to white people) racist mentality, partly fuelled by the grudge about colonial times, probably doesn’t help matters either. We all know how many older desis talk when white people are not around.

    Something we’ve all discussed before here on SM is the fact that, in recent years, Saudi funding of British mosques has been a driver behing the shift from “subcontinental” Islam to a more hardline and conservative Middle Eastern interpretation of the faith (check out a link on the News tab called “What Muslims Want”, for example — large numbers of 2nd-generation Muslims in the UK are more strictly religious and more conservative than their parents). So, finding a way to sever that funding may be a partial solution. A disproportionate number of the problematic Imams here in the UK, for example, have turned to be not South Asian but Middle-Eastern, who have been encouraging both an anti-Western mindset amongst their predominantly-but-not-exclusively South Asian Muslim followers and a “return to pure, Arabian Islam” ethos.

  7. With regards to the global situation as a whole, however, it’s a very difficult issue. Some amateur suggestions by myself:

    1. Target Saudi political and religious leadership. They need to withdraw their support for any religious interpretation which encourages false grievances and an unjustified adversarial attitude against the non-Muslim world. Difficult, considering the historical “deal” between the House of Saud and the Wahabbists.

    2. Target the leadership of the terrorist groups concerned and try to persuade them to change their minds about both their notions of spirituality and their alleged grievances against the West (and non-Muslim countries). Much easier said than done, of course, but there are historical precedents for this, even though the struggle was long, bloody, at huge cost, and with no guarantee of ultimate success.

    3. Attempt to encourage a concerted, organised, worldwide campaign by Islamic religious authorities to debunk OBL/Al-Qaeda and their interpretation of Islam. Of course, the really hardcore jihadists will not care about this and will try to “turn the tables” by claiming that the debunkers themselves are misguided and heretics. However, if the problematic individuals and organisations are explicitly condemned as outlaws and heretical, blasphemous outcastes from the perspective of Islam, then that would perhaps go some way towards undermining support for them along with, possibly, enabling the “Ummah” itself to target and pursue them and thereby solve the problem internally.

    4. The “nuclear option”, if all of the above fail, is to supply enough inalienable academic & historical evidence to debunk the religion itself. Not a nice thing to do, as it will alienate neutral/moderate Muslims everywhere, along with confirming the terrorists’ claims of a “War against Islam”, and in any case the really crazy types will ignore any tangible, verifiable facts presented to them anyway.

    cold war solution–where one sides abandons its ideology for the other side’s

    I partially agree, although I don’t think it’s necessarily an “either/or” situation — the “other side” doesn’t necessarily have to embrace “the secular western societal/cultural model” in its entirety, they just have to modify their interpretation & practice of their theology/ideology, or find another more compatible faith if an atheistic/agnostic vacuum is not desired. Obviously difficult (although not impossible — again there are historical precedents for this), considering the “internal locks & safeguards” within orthodox Islam with regards to apostasy/conversion, along with modification/reinterpretation of the faith’s tenets.

    However, note that none of these approaches actually look at “ways” to mitigate the cause itself.

    …..Which is the crux of the problem. Defending oneself against the “symptoms” is one thing (reactively or pre-emptively), but attacking the root cause is another.

  8. In my life, it’s not my mother that acts like this (she’s very laid back and calm about things), but my mother-in-law, who lives with us. Everything is a portent of doom or on the verge of killing us: “Don’t sleep with the air conditioning on, it will give you pneumonia!”, “That rattling near my tires probably means I’ll need to replace the entire engine!”, “If you buy online at Amazon they’ll steal your credit card information and buy themselves boats with your money!”, “You need to cook your pork to 180 degrees or you’ll die!”.

    I just kind of nod my head and keep doing what I’m doing. No sense in angering my Mother-in-law because it ends up angering my wife.

  9. There is also a trial of 7 British-born wannabe jihadists underway in London as you may be aware — they wanted to blow up nightclubs, attack energy grids etc.

    I was not aware of this trial. Its not getting much play in the American media.

  11. Thanks for the article. Its really very depressing. I fear that the current and future conflicts in the Middle East will just add fuel to this fire. I went to school in UK and was impressed by how mainstream is the profile of desis in UK. At the same time, I was appalled by the desi ghettos (mostly pakistani) and the poverty, unemployment, religious conservatism in some of those areas. You really dont see that in the Desi Muslim communities in the US.

  12. AlMfD,

    You’re absolutely right about the state of affairs here in the UK — it’s been wreaking havoc in the country as a whole (7/7 being the most obvious example) along with having serious repercussions for South Asians of all backgrounds in general.

    You might also find it informative to check out the “What Muslims Want” article in the News tab (date: August 8, 2006), along with the related link to the ongoing discussion on Pickled Politics. There was basically a wide-ranging survey here in the UK about British Muslim attitudes on a variety of issues, followed up by a high-profile programme to discuss the findings on one of the main terrestrial British channels a few days ago.

  13. I don’t know what the Princeton student actually designed, but the Nagasaki bomb actually had a 21-kiloton yield and was far more complex; it had a plutonium core, which requires a little more ingenuity to detonate. The Hiroshima bomb used enriched uranium, the most easily available source for terrorists, I would imagine. A uranium bomb is EXTREMELY basic in construction, so basic that no one felt any need to test it before dropping it on Hiroshima (the Trinity test was of the plutonium bomb). It works like this: Take two sub-critical masses. Put them about 1 meter apart, say at opposite ends of a cannon. Fire one towards the other at gun velocities with whatever explosives. When they collide they will form a critical mass; chain reaction and a nuclear explosion will result. Presto. I could probably build this in my basement in a month or two (although the risk of blowing myself and half of my city up is obviously great). Now I just need to find some enriched uranium. Oh, wait… it’s nearly impossible to get ahold of enriched uranium!

  14. Oh, wait… it’s nearly impossible to get ahold of enriched uranium!

    I wouldn’t bet on that assumption…

    Britain’s reprocessing plant at Dounreay was shut down on 2 December because 10 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) was found to be missing during a routine inspection.Link International nuclear inspectors, already troubled by the disappearance of bomb-grade uranium from an ex-Soviet institute, want answers to an even more disturbing question: Has any equipment that makes such material disappeared as well?Link

    A quick google search on “missing enriched uranium” shows a bunch of articles. And that’s only what the authorities are publically admitting I’m sure.

  15. Everyone, a massive terror plot to blow up 10 passenger jets mid-flight from the UK to America has just been foiled. 21 people have been arrested in the UK and most of the wannabe jihadists are unfortunately of South Asian (specifically Pakistani) origin, although they’re all British citizens. It’s causing chaos at Heathrow Airport along with impacting flights and airports worldwide.

    I’ve posted a couple of “Breaking News” articles on the News tab, so please check them out for further information.

    Seems like my conversation with AlMfD yesterday was terribly prescient.