8 Quotes by Daniel Gardner

Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist.

The safety gap is so large, in fact, that planes would still be safer than cars even if the threat of terrorism were unimaginably worse than it actually is: An American professor calculated that even if terrorists were hijacking and crashing one passenger jet a week in the United States, a person who took one flight a month for a year would have only a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking – a trivial risk compared to the annual 1-in-6,000 odds of being killed in a car crash.

We are the healthiest, wealthiest, and longest-lived people in history. And we are increasingly afraid. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time.

Childhood is starting to resemble a prison sentence, with children spending almost every moment behind locked doors and alarms, their every movement scheduled, supervised, and controlled. Are they at least safer as a result? Probably not. Obesity, diabetes, and the other health problems caused in part by too much time sitting inside are a lot more dangerous than the specters haunting parental imaginations.

Put all these numbers together and what do they add up to? In a sentence: We are the healthiest, wealthiest, and longest-lived people in history. And we are increasingly afraid. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time.

In 1933, it was in Franklin Roosevelt’s political interest to tell Americans the greatest danger was “fear itself.” Seventy years later, it was in George W. Bush’s political interest to do the opposite: The White House got the support it needed for invading Iraq by stoking public fears of terrorism and connecting those fears to Iraq.

So the assumption of political experts is wrong. It isn’t the less informed who are likely to be influenced by fear-driven advertising. It is the more informed.

The idea of “bounded rationality” is now widely accepted, and its insights are fueling research throughout the social sciences. Even economists are increasingly accepting that Homo sapiens is not Homo economicus, and a dynamic new field called “behavioral economics” is devoted to bringing the insights of psychology to economics.