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By Root 918 0

purely cosmetic. Mathematically speaking, the two scenarios were identical. If people were logical creatures, the first group of subjects should make the exact same choices as the second group. Yet Kahneman and Tversky found that the wording of the programs made a tremendous difference—it was the phrasing, not the mathematics, that determined how people would behave. When the phrasing emphasized survivors over victims, subjects voted overwhelmingly—72 percent to 28 percent—to eschew the risky course of action, instead taking the conservative course that saves some patients with high certainty but lets others die. But when the wording spoke of victims rather than survivors, subjects suddenly became less risk-averse; they voted even more overwhelmingly—22 percent to 78 percent—to make a desperate gamble to save lives. The risks were exactly the same in both cases, but people, with their bad sense of risk, couldn’t figure that out. The test subjects made their decisions based not on logic but upon how an authority presented the risks to them.

Minor changes in wording can easily make a huge risk seem worth taking or an insignificant risk seem dangerous. As a result, we are vulnerable to manipulation. We can’t easily detect when someone is understating or exaggerating risks. We are prey to risk mismanagement.

Perhaps more than any other form of proofiness, risk mismanagement means big business. In NASA’s case, it meant billions of dollars. By understating the risks of shuttle flights, they got funding from Congress to pursue a disastrous program—one that would kill fourteen astronauts for very little palpable gain. And other entrepreneurs are hoping to follow in NASA’s footsteps. However, spaceflight is just a tiny part of the picture. Much of our economy revolves around risk—risk and money go hand in hand. There are entire industries devoted to managing and assessing risk; corporations have figured out how to make incredible amounts of money by measuring risk, packaging it, dividing it, and moving it around. And where there’s money to be made, there’s risk mismanagement. If you gaze deeply into the center of the ongoing financial crisis, you see risk mismanagement staring back at you. Risk mismanagement is crippling our economy, and along the way making a small handful of malefactors very, very wealthy.

NASA isn’t the only game in town when it comes to getting people into space on the back of risk mismanagement. Airline magnate Richard Branson is hard at work trying to snooker private investors just as NASA snookered Congress. Branson is currently running a private spaceflight enterprise, “Virgin Galactic,” which within its first five years of operation is supposedly going to launch an estimated three thousand passengers into space. Safely. “Virgin has a detailed understanding of what it takes to manage and operate complex transportation organizations . . . such as Virgin Atlantic Airlines and Virgin Trains which carry millions of passengers each year and have enjoyed superb safety records,” brags the Virgin Galactic website. If you believe Virgin, spaceflight will be no riskier than a little jaunt on a private jet.

Hogwash. By comparing spaceflight to plane and train travel, Virgin is effectively underestimating the huge risks you take when you strap yourself to a rocket. It’s a very dangerous task to pack enough energy into a cylinder to get you into space—and it’s equally dangerous when, falling through the atmosphere, you get that energy back and have to dissipate it away in the form of heat. Throughout the history of spaceflight, about one in a hundred human-carrying rockets has killed its passengers, and that risk seems unlikely to change in the near future.

One chance in a hundred might not seem like so much, especially for the rare privilege of becoming an astronaut. But as far as risks go, it’s extraordinarily high. For comparison, if today’s U.S. passenger aircraft had a similar failure rate, there would be roughly 275 U.S. plane crashes and 20,000 fatalities every day. A one in a hundred chance of dying every