Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [8]
These objections are good and true. But while there are exceptions to every rule, it’s also good to know the rule. In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking—our daily decisions, our laws, our governance—on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.
Cast an eye back for a moment to the summer months of 2001, which in the United States came to be known as the Summer of the Shark. The media brought us chilling tales of rampant shark carnage. The prime example was the story of Jessie Arbogast, an eight-year-old boy who was playing in the warm, shallow Gulf waves of Pensacola, Florida, when a bull shark ripped off his right arm and gorged a big piece of his thigh as well. Time magazine ran a cover package about shark attacks. Here is the lead of the main article:
Sharks come silently, without warning. There are three ways they strike: the hit-and-run, the bump-and-bite and the sneak attack. The hit-and-run is the most common. The shark may see the sole of a swimmer’s foot, think it’s a fish and take a bite before realizing this isn’t its usual prey.
Scared yet?
A reasonable person might never go near the ocean again. But how many shark attacks do you think actually happened that year?
Take a guess—and then cut your guess in half, and now cut it in half a few more times. During the entire year of 2001, around the world there were just 68 shark attacks, of which 4 were fatal.
Not only are these numbers far lower than the media hysteria implied; they were also no higher than in earlier years or in the years to follow. Between 1995 and 2005, there were on average 60.3 worldwide shark attacks each year, with a high of 79 and a low of 46. There were on average 5.9 fatalities per year, with a high of 11 and a low of 3. In other words, the headlines during the summer of 2001 might just as easily have read “Shark Attacks About Average This Year.” But that probably wouldn’t have sold many magazines.
So for a moment, instead of thinking about poor Jessie Arbogast and the tragedy he and his family faced, think of this: in a world with more than 6 billion people, only 4 of them died in 2001 from shark attacks. More people are probably run over each year by TV news vans.
Elephants, meanwhile, kill at least 200 people every year. So why aren’t we petrified of them? Probably because most of their victims live in places far from the world’s media centers. It may also have something to do with the perceptions we glean from the movies. Friendly, entertaining elephants are a staple of children’s films (think Babar and Dumbo); sharks, meanwhile, are inevitably typecast as villains. If sharks had any legal connections whatsoever, they surely would have sued for an injunction against Jaws.
And yet the shark scare played out so relentlessly that summer of 2001, with such full-throated horror, that it didn’t quiet down until the terrorist attacks on September 11 at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Nearly 3,000 people were killed that day—some 2,500 more than have died from shark attacks since the first records were kept, in the late sixteenth century.
So despite its shortcomings, thinking in terms of the typical does have its advantages. We have therefore done our best to tell stories