But what no politician mentioned is that air travel is safer than driving. Dramatically safer—so much so that the most dangerous part of a typical commercial flight is the drive to the airport.
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.
Risk analysts knew all about this safety gap. And they understood what a large-scale shift from planes to cars would mean. It’s simple mathematics. If one person gives up the relative safety of flying and drives instead, it’s not a big deal. He will almost certainly survive. But if millions of people take the same risk, it is just as likely that some of them will lose the gamble and their lives.
But car crashes aren’t like terrorist hijackings. They aren’t covered live on CNN. They aren’t discussed endlessly by pundits. They don’t inspire Hollywood movies and television shows. They aren’t fodder for campaigning politicians. And so in the months following the September 11 attacks, as politicians and journalists worried endlessly about terrorism, anthrax, and dirty bombs, people who fled the airports to be safe from terrorism crashed and bled to death on America’s roads. And nobody noticed.
Or rather, few people noticed. Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, patiently gathered data on travel and fatalities. In 2006, he published a paper comparing the numbers five years prior to the September 11 attacks and five years after.
It turned out that the shift from planes to cars in America lasted one year. Then traffic patterns went back to normal. Gigerenzer also found that, exactly as expected, fatalities on American roads soared after September 2001 and settled back to normal levels in September 2002. With these data, Gigerenzer was able to calculate the number of Americans killed in car crashes as a direct result of the switch from planes to cars.
It was 1,595. That is more than one-half the total death toll of history’s worst terrorist atrocity. It is six times higher than the total number of people on board the doomed flights of September 11. It is 319 times the total number of people killed by the infamous anthrax attacks of 2001.
And yet almost nobody noticed but the families of the dead. And not even the families really understood what had happened. They thought— they still think—that they lost husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and children to the routine traffic accidents we accept as the regrettable cost of living in the modern world.
They didn’t. It was fear that stole their loved ones.
1
Prehistoric Refugee
Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew a thing or two about fear. When FDR raised his hand to take the oath that would make him the thirty-second president of the United States, fear had settled like a thick gray fog across Washington. It was the very bottom of the Great Depression. Banks were falling like dominoes, and more than half the industrial production of the United States had evaporated. Prices for farm products had collapsed, one in four workers was unemployed, and two million Americans were homeless.
This was the country whose care was about to be entrusted to a partially paralyzed man who had narrowly escaped assassination only a month before. Eleanor Roosevelt understandably described her husband’s inauguration as “terrifying.”
In his first address as president, Roosevelt spoke directly to the mood of the day. “I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our nation impels,” he began. “This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Of course Roosevelt knew there were plenty of things to fear aside from fear itself. But he also knew that as serious as the nation’s problems were, “unreasoning fear” would make things far worse by eroding faith in liberal democracy and convincing people to embrace the mad dreams of communism and fascism. The Great Depression could hurt the United States. But fear could destroy it.
It’s an insight older than the United States itself. Roosevelt’s line was lifted from Henry David Thoreau, and Thoreau in turn got it from Michel de Montaigne, who wrote “the thing I fear most is fear” more than three and a half centuries ago.
Fear can be a constructive emotion. When we worry about a risk, we pay more attention to it and take action where warranted. Fear keeps us alive and thriving. It’s no exaggeration to say that our species owes its very existence to fear. But “unreasoning fear” is another matter. It was unreasoning fear that could have destroyed the United States in the Great Depression. It was unreasoning fear that killed 1,595 people by convincing them to abandon planes for cars after the September 11 attacks. And it is the growing presence of unreasoning fear in all the countries of the Western world that is causing us to make increasingly foolish decisions in dealing with the risks we face every day.
Risk and fear are hot topics among sociologists, who have come to a broad consensus that those of us living in modern countries worry more than previous generations. Some say we live in a culture of fear. Terrorists, Internet stalkers, crystal meth, avian flu, genetically modified organisms, contaminated food: New threats seem to sprout like poisonous mushrooms. Climate change, carcinogens, leaky breast implants, the “obesity epidemic,” pesticides, West Nile virus, SARS, avian flu, and flesh-eating disease. The list goes on and on. Open the newspaper, watch the evening news. On any given day, there’s a good chance that someone—a journalist, activist, consultant, corporate executive, or politician—is warning about an “epidemic” of something or other that threatens you and those you hold dear.
Occasionally, these fears burst into full-bore panics. The pedophile lurking in parks and Internet chat rooms is the latest. In the early 1990s, it was road rage. A decade earlier, it was herpes. Satanic cults, mad cow disease,school shootings, crack cocaine—all these have raced to the top of the public’s list of concerns, only to drop as rapidly as they went up. Some surge back to prominence now and then. Others slip into the category of minor nuisances and are never heard from again. Farewell, herpes.
This is just the stuff of daily news. Authors, activists, consultants, and futurologists are constantly warning us about threats so spectacular and exotic they make scenarios of nuclear Armageddon look quaint. Genetically enhanced bioweapons; self-replicating nanotechnology turning everything into “gray goo”; weird experiments in physics that create a black hole, sucking in the planet and everyone on it. The millennium bug was a bust, but that hasn’t stopped theories of annihilation from piling up so quickly it’s become almost commonplace to hear claims that humanity will be lucky to survive the next century.