corrente

The numbers tell the story.

With 9/11 images etched in their memories and some transatlantic flights canceled, travelers have terrorists on their minds. "I'm going Greyhound rather than fly to California," my Baltimore cousin explains. "Al Qaeda's not so likely to target a bus." Others, also fearing the worst, elect to drive rather than fly.

But the fears are often out of sync with the facts. The National Safety Council reports that in the last half of the 1990s, Americans were, mile for mile, 37 times more likely to die in a vehicle crash than on a commercial flight. In a late-2001 essay for the American Psychological Society, I calculated that if — because of 9/11 — we flew 20% less and instead drove half those unflown miles, about 800 more people would die in traffic accidents in the next year. In an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer finds that the last three months of 2001 indeed produced 350 more U.S. traffic fatalities than the average for those months in the previous five years.

(David Myers in the LA Times)

Ask yourself—If fear isn't in your interest, then whose interest is it in?