The Real Story of Risk: Adventures in a Hazardous World

207 Pages·2012·1.81 MB·English

by  Glenn Croston

Published 2012 by Prometheus Books The Real Story of Risk: Adventures in a Hazardous World. Copyright
© 2012 by Glenn Croston. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Croston, Glenn E., 1964– The real story of risk :
adventures in a hazardous world / by Glenn Croston.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–61614–660–3 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978–1–61614–661–0 (ebook) 1. Risk—Social
aspects. I. Title.
HM1101.C768 2012
338.5—dc23
2012023645
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Introduction. The Risky Business of Life
Chapter 1. The Evolution of Risk: How Our Ancient Biology Distorts Our
Dealings with Sharks, Snakes, and a Changing World
Chapter 2. The Sea of Denial: Why Rising Seas and Heart Disease Are Hard to
Stop
Chapter 3. Suckers for a Pretty Face: How Sex and Love Lure Us to Let Down
Our Guard
Chapter 4. Why We Botch Rare Risks: The Strange Story of “The Big One,”
9/11, Katrina, and Deepwater Horizon
Chapter 5. The Balancing Act: The Give-and-Take Game of Driving and
Financial Collapses
Chapter 6. Losing Control and Gaining Fear: Small Aircraft, Fear of Riding
Along, and Conspiracy Theories
Chapter 7. The Story of Vaccines and Autism: Why Stories Rule and Statistics
Don't
Chapter 8. The Thing We Fear More Than Death: How Our Need to Belong
Makes Us Vulnerable to Con Men and Fearful of Podiums
Chapter 9. What Do Cave Diving, Naked Skydiving, and Entrepreneurship Have
in Common? The Delicate Dance of Risk and Reward
Chapter 10. Living in a Risky World
Notes
Index
We live in a risky world, one packed with danger everywhere you look and
plenty of places you don't. Every day we get out of bed we're up against cancer,
earthquakes, financial crashes, terrorism, crime, heart attacks, car accidents, and
oil spills. Hazards lurk in our arteries, in the air, on the freeway, or waiting to
hurl down on us from space. The dangers are as big as the sun or as small as a
virus, as exotic as a shark attack or as mundane as slipping in the bathtub.
They're everywhere. All in all, it's enough to make you want to pull up the
covers, close your eyes, and hope the risks will all just go away.
But somehow they never do. No matter how much we hope, wish, and pray,
the risks are still there. There's no escaping them. We can avoid and reduce the
many risks we face through prudent decisions about how we live and work, but
no matter what we do we cannot make them go away entirely. Many are
completely beyond our control, which makes them feel even riskier.
It's a wonder we manage to deal with it all. Often we don't.
Often we get the risks completely wrong, even when we know better. We do
our best to ignore common hazards like heart disease, which kills one in five
people in the United States, while we are terrified of sharks, which are mainly a
hazard in movies. We squirm with discomfort in the passenger seat of a car and
lose all fear when we're behind the wheel. A man will go to great lengths to
protect himself financially with insurance, investments, and savings, yet cross a
busy street through traffic in a subconscious attempt to impress a woman. We
shrink in fear from snakes, which affect a handful of people each year in the
United States, but somehow in 2006 we were blind to the looming financial
crisis until it came crashing down all around us. This story plays out over and
over many times in many different ways. We're preoccupied with dangers that
almost never affect us while ignoring huge risks that affect millions. How we see
the world is frequently and wildly out of whack with the real world all around
us.
The risks are easy to see looking back, but we're stubbornly resistant to seeing
them at the time. How could we not have seen the financial crisis coming? How
blind were we? Millions of risky home loans were pushed through with minimal
scrutiny and then cut into pieces, repackaged, and sold as if they had been
washed clean. Even financial professionals either missed the dangers or chose
not to see them. Was the whole country, the whole world even, collectively out
to lunch? How can we do better next time at seeing and responding to other risks
that are still out there, like climate change, taking steps to prevent them before
they explode in our faces?
THE PAST
The answers are rooted deep in our nature and far back in time. We are marvels
of evolution, with our brain and body capable of wonders we scarcely
understand, but we are also ill prepared in many ways to deal with the world we
face today. The problem is that while we are marvels of evolution, we evolved in
a different world. Our human nature is not adapted for the unnatural world we
now live in.
Humanity's roots lie in eastern Africa in a long string of ancestors that
emerged over the last few million years. Gradually over time, these ancestors
became more and more like modern humans, arriving at our present biological
state as Homo sapiens about 160,000 years ago. We did not get this far without
some well-honed tools.
One set of tools, called “affective responses,” help us to feel our way around
with quick-and-dirty, gut-level reactions based in biology, instinct, and emotion.
We are constantly scanning the world around us for anything that feels risky or
safe; the former leading us to feel fear, disgust, and outrage, and the latter
stirring pleasant feelings like security, trust, and affection. When you get cut off
on the highway, are chased by a dog, or receive a terse e-mail from your spouse,
your affective responses sound the alarm. Your heart pounds and your palms
sweat as you instinctively mobilize for action. The touch of a loved one, a warm
meal, or a good story with friends around a campfire can have the opposite
effect, infusing us with the feeling that everything will be okay. Responding this
way takes little effort—it comes naturally to us.
We also use our intellect to think through risks on occasion, reasoning our
way around hazards using statistics, science, and formal logic to look for better
solutions than feelings alone can provide. Thinking things through is slow
compared to feelings, and it takes more effort. While the solutions provided by
thinking can be superior, the time and effort involved can lead to “analysis
paralysis” if carried too far. Thinking through risks can also lack emotional
impact and fail to jolt us into action.
To understand how we see risks today, we need to take a look back in time.
Recorded history stretches back only five thousand to ten thousand years or so,
leaving the rest of the story deeper in time to be pieced together by archeologists
who sift through the rocks and dirt to uncover our story in fossils and artifacts.
Humans evolved over millions of years, leaving behind scattered fossils that tell
the story of who we were and how we got here. Fossils reveal not only physical
facts about our ancestors' height, age, and sex, but also clues about how they
lived and how they died. The story these fossils tell is not a pretty tale of a happy
and simpler halcyon age with humans frolicking in nature's plenty. Their
fossilized remains instead reveal signs of disease, with bones warped from lack
of nutrition. Fossilized bones often show evidence of predators attacking early
humans, leaving holes cut into their skulls by fangs. The world for humans back
then would have been like one giant food court with you on the menu.
All of these risks shaped the evolution of humans, pressuring the early species
to evolve over time to deal with these risks. With the gene pool constantly
eroded around the edges by predators and the hunt for food, the pool moved and
shrank. By looking at the genetic diversity of humans on earth today, we can tell
that, at one point early on, the human population dwindled to only five thousand
or so people. That's about the size of a small liberal-arts college, just without the
buildings, books, and faculty, and with far more predators. Despite the
dominance of humans on earth today, it was by no means a sure thing that we'd
be here at all—we just barely missed extinction. Those few who survived this
bottleneck and the many other challenges over millions of years passed on their
traits to you, me, and the other seven billion people on earth today. Those who
failed to deal with these ancient threats disappeared, and their genes went with
them, leaving only their broken, scarred, and fossilized bones.
We are the descendants of the winners in this ancient struggle, the ones who
fought these ancient risks and won. We are the children of the survivors, walking
the earth here today. We have within us, woven throughout our minds and
bodies, all the adaptations that helped them survive. We have their upright
stance, their ability to find precious food and run long distances to chase game or
avoid being eaten. We have their keen vision, the ability to make tools, and the
skill to use rich languages for communication. And we have their feelings and
analytical responses embedded in our senses, intuitions, and thoughts.
As the descendants of those who fought ancient risks and won, we are ideally
suited to survive the perils our ancestors faced. Unfortunately, though, we no
longer live in their world. Their world no longer even exists. The adaptations
humans evolved with—our bipedal stance, large cerebrum, opposable thumbs,
tool-making skills, symbolic language, and complex social groups—gave us the
ability not just to survive in the world but also to shape it toward our own ends.
And we have been spectacularly good at this task, reshaping the world almost
beyond recognition.
When humans arose they were a few scattered groups in a vast sea of
wilderness, while today seven billion of us live on our planet and no corner of
our world is untouched by us. When humans arose they lived close to the land,
getting food provided from the bounty of nature, or starving when nature was
less bountiful. Today the majority of humanity lives in cities and never sees
where our food originates; instead we buy it in grocery stores and rely on vast
supply chains that span the globe. Kids think that eggs come from cartons, not
chickens, and that tuna fish grows in cans. Snakes and predators were once a real
threat, but in the developed world of urban dwellers, these ancient threats are
seldom encountered except in reality television and movies.
THE PRESENT
If you are reading this book, odds are that you live in one of the more
technologically and economically developed parts of the world. Your
environment, the world you are immersed in every day of your life, is most
likely dominated by computers, grocery stores, cars, smartphones, televisions,
and buildings. You have water piped in and wastes piped out, most likely. Most
people in the developed world have at least some access to medicine. As life has
changed, the dangers we face have changed too.
While the hazards early humans faced, like snakes and predators, have faded,
new risks that early humans could never have conceived of have taken their
place. The world has changed, but our minds and bodies have not, leaving us
poorly equipped to handle the risks of the world we live in today. We may know
how to reproduce, find calories, and avoid a charging buffalo, but we deal poorly
with the risks of public speaking, the fine print in mortgages, and junk food
because our nature leads us astray. We failed to stop the financial crisis because
deep within us we are still on the lookout for predators and snakes and can't see
the modern risks that surround us, staring us right in the face.
Risk is often seen as a matter of statistical tables used by insurance companies
and complex models run by hedge funds to stay one jump ahead of the ever-
shifting tides of financial markets. But for most of us in our daily lives, the
journey into the world of risk is not one of statistics and financial models but an
adventure in a distorted world.
Risk is not something we can fully describe based on probabilities, but it is
something that we think and feel our way through, moment by moment, every
day of our lives: “It does not exist ‘out there,’ independent of our minds and
cultures, waiting to be measured,” wrote Paul Slovic and Elke Weber. “Instead,
risk is seen as a concept that human beings have invented to help them
understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life.”1
The influences of past dangers are pervasive in our lives today, shaping nearly
everything we feel, think, and do. Our biology and instincts protected us from
predators and snakes, but now they lead us astray when these perils have
dwindled in the developed world (see ch. 1). We do well at jumping out of the
way of a charging buffalo, but we do poorly at avoiding the glacial creep of
slow-moving threats like climate change that don't feel like an imminent peril
(see ch. 2). While we may go to great lengths to avoid threats, sex and love can
lure us to take crazy risks we would never consider if in our right mind (ch. 3).
Our tendency to learn from immediate experience makes us think rare risks like
oil-well blowouts or earthquakes will never happen (see ch. 4); and our ability to
adapt to a changing world makes us immune to everyday risks like driving (see
ch. 5). Our basic need for control leads athletes and stock traders to create
superstitions in risky situations (see ch. 6), while statistics are ignored because
we see the world and its dangers through stories (see ch. 7). Our deep-rooted
need to be social and belong to the group makes us fear public speaking beyond
all reason, and makes us vulnerable to white-collar criminals (see ch. 8). Money,
drugs, and food make us run toward dangers rather than away, driven by the
never-ending quest for a neurotransmitter high (see ch. 9). Everywhere we look,
our lives are twisted by our twisted sense of risk.
THE FUTURE
While we had millions of years of evolution that helped humans to adapt to old
threats, we have had only a few decades to adapt to the threats of the modern
world. The world is changing so rapidly that our biology can't keep up. Given
time, we might eventually evolve to better live in the new world we have
created. Evidence suggests that evolution is still underway in humanity with our
gene pool on the move, but time is short. The evolution of humanity took place
over millions of years, but few of us have that kind of time to wait around for the
next stage of risk evolution to unfold.
We don't have to wait for evolution, though. Evolution has given us feelings,
instincts, and intuitions that flavor how we see the world and its dangers.
Evolution has given us the power of intellect that can provide a useful
counterpoint to our gut instinct. We cannot change the tools we are given, but by