Risk Assessment and Its Politicization – Part 3
How the politicization of risk can affect the life prospects of the next generation.
There’s a popular video used at teacher training sessions, including in my own local school district, that describes how harmful it is to encourage kids’ obsession with small risks. In the video, Jacob Ham says:
I really want to think about what's the best way to teach teachers about trauma without getting them distracted with all the technical stuff, and what’s the most important thing for them to understand and learn. And I thought that the best way to do it might be to just make a difference between a learning brain versus a brain in survival mode, so we'll just call it learning brain versus survival brain. And this is the difference.
So, learning brain is this brain that’s open to learning new information, and it's completely ok with ambiguity and grays and vagueness, and it sees the big picture. It pulls back like it’s on the balcony and can look over the forest and figure out what’s going on. On an emotional level, people in learning brain feel calm, peaceful, maybe a little excited about what they’re about to learn, maybe a little playful, and having fun too, and definitely curious. And they’re not afraid of making mistakes because it’s just part of the learning process, and so they’re not really thinking about themselves, and they actually feel a little bit of confidence that if they just apply themselves they might pick up what they’re trying to learn.
Now, survival brain on the other hand is completely different. It’s hyper focused on threat. It doesn’t like ambiguity … It thinks in black and white terms. It doesn’t want anything to be gray at all. And then emotionally, you can imagine that survival brain makes people feel panicky, a little obsessive, and afraid of getting things wrong. And they don’t feel calm and open to learning new things. They just want to get things over with …
Now it's really important to understand how learning brain and survival brain interact because the survival brain always trumps learning brain. And that makes sense, because survival brain’s just trying to save your life. And so, if it thinks that there’s something dangerous happening, you better pay attention to it, right? But the tricky thing is that as survival brain stays on longer and longer, it’s harder to get out of that. It’s harder to really go into learning brain.
As we’ve explored in previous essays, all too often parents and other adults model survival brain, not learning brain, to children. As economist Bryan Caplan writes:
“But is it safe?” Good economists will scoff that it’s a meaningless question, because safety is always a matter of degree. Nothing in the real world is perfectly safe. Even if you spend your day hiding in your house, you could die of a heart attack, an earthquake, or a home invasion. In contrast, non-economists -- and bad economists -- love binary thinking about risk. Everything is either “safe” or “unsafe.” This was blatant during COVID. How many times did you hear the sentences, “Is it safe to reopen restaurants?,” “Is it safe to reopen schools?,” and “Is it safe to fly yet?” What silly questions! Each activity has a positive probability of catching and spreading COVID -- and the probability of bad outcomes rises the more time you spend doing the activity. Politically, however, you couldn’t regain your freedom until an authority gave each silly question an even sillier answer. “Yes, flying is now safe again.”
The COVID pandemic, and its politicization, proved to be a case study in how risk preference can become tainted by politics, a subject explored in a previous essay here. And this political shaping of risk perception runs through a large variety of issues. As Michael Barone explains, much of this political division is attributed to different understandings of reasonable risk aversion:
Biden is clearly wrong on another point. This is not “not about politics.” America’s constitutional federal system, and the latitude both the Trump and Biden administrations have given to state governments, has produced distinctly different Democratic and Republican coronavirus policies. Democrats have tended to impose mask mandates, to order the closing of restaurants and retail businesses, and to require distancing rules. Republicans have tended to push for full-time instruction in schools and to allow open-air gatherings in playgrounds and beaches. Yes, there are exceptions here and there. But what’s most striking is the prevalence of partisan patterns. Look at the maps of school closings, mask mandates, and mask usage, and the partisan patterns are obvious. The economic results are obvious, too. With more restrictions, Democratic states have seen higher unemployment and less economic growth than Republican states.
Why the partisan correlation? The answer is that different responses to a pandemic reflect different degrees of risk aversion, and political differences often reflect differences in risk aversion, as well. As economist Allison Schrager argues, welfare state protections have appealed to risk-averse traditional Democrats, while deregulated free markets have appealed to more risk-taking Republicans. Women tend to be more risk-averse for obvious evolutionary reasons (they’re needed for species survival) and more Democratic and dovish; men, more willing to take risks, are more Republican and hawkish. There’s a reason every society protecting itself against attack has always depended on strong, aggressive, and utterly non-risk-averse young men. One oddity of COVID-19 responses in the United States has been the one-dimensional perspective of liberal decision-makers. They claim to be following “the science,” but with a narrow focus. To prevent the spread of a virus that is often asymptomatic and less lethal than influenza to people under age 65, they have imposed restrictions that have reduced lifesaving medical screenings and produced mental illness and stunted development among children and adolescents. The economic and spiritual cost has been highest on their home turf. Manhattan has lost a half-million private sector jobs, has seen thousands of restaurants close permanently, and its concert halls and entertainment venues sit empty. The things that make New York and mini-Manhattans around the country attractive to an overwhelmingly liberal minority have suffered terrible damage. The urge to close things down, however, has occasionally been suspended. Liberals who denounced spring breakers on Florida beaches were unfazed by tighter-packed “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter demonstrators last summer. So, this one-dimensional risk-averseness starts to look like an urge to control the movements of others. It’s an urge that is visible in liberals’ enthusiasm for fixed-rail transit: ruinously expensive trolleys in central cities, California’s high-speed rail to nowhere. Rails control where people can travel and not let them go anywhere they want in their cars. Some risk-averse policies resulted from an initial and inevitable ignorance about a novel virus. Unlike the flu, it’s not spread on surfaces; unlike colds, it’s not manifested among children; unlike Ebola, it’s not easily susceptible to contact tracing. But risk-averse decision-makers are reluctant to abandon any restrictions once they’re in place. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s director says the CDC data “suggest that vaccinated people do not carry the virus.” But Biden wants mask mandates continued, and Dr. Anthony Fauci talks of double-masking.
(Regarding U.S. children and COVID, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association contains a table showing that “accidental deaths [among children] are NINE TIMES Covid deaths, and murders and suicides [among children] are each more than triple Covid deaths.”)
And again, exaggerating risks for political purposes can cripple not only the political discourse of today, but the life prospects of the next generation. As Arthur Brooks points out in The Atlantic:
No doubt these [danger-obsessed] beliefs come from the best of intentions. If you want children to be safe (and thus, happy), you should teach them that the world is dangerous -- that way, they will be more vigilant and careful. But in fact, teaching them that the world is dangerous is bad for their health, happiness, and success. The contention that the world is mostly safe or mostly dangerous is what some psychologists call a “primal world belief,” one about life’s basic essence … As much as we hope the dangerous-world belief will help our kids, the evidence indicates that it does exactly the opposite. In the same paper, Clifton and Meindl show that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives … To break this pattern, parents -- and anyone who interacts with children -- should instead work to cultivate a sense of safety. Here are three rules to help you get started … Parents might feed their kids negative primals because they hold such views themselves. This is easy to do in a world where we are bombarded with news and information, which studies have linked to distress, anxiety, and depression—even when the news is not specifically negative. And research shows that many parents pass on their anxiety to their children. One way to allay our own fears is simply to look at the facts. As the journalist Christopher Ingraham has written, being a kid in America has never been safer. Since 1935, the number of childhood deaths between the ages of 1 and 4 fell from 450 to 30 per 100,000. It has fallen by nearly half just since 1990, and the decreases in other age groups are similarly impressive. Use this knowledge to counteract the media’s relentless focus on fear and danger. You might even print out a chart on declining childhood mortality (such as the one linked above) and put it on the fridge as a reminder of how good your kids have it.
And there may well be a connection between “helicopter parenting” and “helicopter voting.” Perhaps not surprisingly, “helicopter parents” who seek to limit their children’s freedom in order to reduce their children’s exposure to even the smallest risks have been found to also support government policies that restrict the personal freedom of adults.
As I wrote previously, “At first, ancient cultures, including those of ancient Greece, tended to believe a whole variety of gods and demigods controlled individual aspects of life and nature. With so many deities controlling so many different things, and with the intentions of those deities opaque at best, there was no incentive for believers in those deities to try to discern and make sense of larger patterns in life.” Today, people who politicize risk and exaggerate it for political effect are returning to the days of belief in arbitrary demigods: there’s a demigod for gun violence, another for pandemics, and on and on, with some deities’ being worshipped a lot more than others based on one’s preferred (political) religion.
And remember that astragalus discussed in the first essay in this series? It was the animal ankle bone used as early forms of dice — but its sides were asymmetrical, so the odds of any given side resting flat were never equal. Yet people played games with astragali with rules that assumed (falsely) that the odds were equal. Politicizing risk by artificially elevating some risks, and artificially lowering others, to sustain a political narrative is as crude as rolling an animal’s ankle bone seems now.
As Vaclav Smil writes in his book How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going:
We habitually underestimate voluntary, familiar risks while we repeatedly exaggerate involuntary, unfamiliar exposures. We constantly overestimate the risks stemming from recent shocking experiences and underestimate the risk of events once they recede in our collective and institutional memory … Public reaction to risks is guided more by a dread of what is unfamiliar, unknown, or poorly understood than by any comparative appraisal of actual consequences. When these strong emotional reactions are involved, people focus excessively on the possibility of a dreaded outcome (death by a terrorist attack or by a viral pandemic) rather than trying to keep in mind the probability of such an outcome taking place.
It’s also influenced by political ideology. In another context, Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher write (in their book Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America):
Our social and political disputes are real, and they matter. There are right and wrong answers to the pressing questions of the day. The problem is not that we are incapable of thinking through difficult cultural and policy issues. Rather, the problem is a phenomenon we will call “bundling.” Social and political problems are complicated, and practical politics requires the formation of a platform. The process forces us to lump together positions on a wide variety of topics -- from climate change, abortion, and tariffs to Afghanistan -- in order to form parties and mobilize a base. Furthermore, the psychology research shows that we get a hit of positive hormones when we feel like part of a group. Taken together, bundling positions on a wide variety of issues in order to form a party is just too hard to resist. Unfortunately, reality doesn’t actually conform to the traditional political platforms, and often positions are bundled together that don’t necessarily follow from the same principles. That’s just one reason why we argue here that we cannot fruitfully address issues of racial justice without first committing ourselves to a process of unbundling.
The same applies to the subject of risk: we cannot fruitfully address issues of risk without first committing ourselves to a process of unbundling.
No matter what your political persuasion, it’s worth thinking about how one might recalibrate one’s personal assessment of risk, if only to avoid inculcating excessive timidity in the next generation. And try to involve the next generation in that exercise, too. As Bryan Caplan writes, “How are we supposed to cope in this desert of Social Desirability Bias? Do a little math. Compare unfamiliar risks to familiar risks. Start with: How does this risk compare to the risk of driving? Nor should you crunch the numbers in isolation. Do it with your family, especially your kids. If you don’t lead your family with good math, demagogues will lead it with bad politics.” (Before my own kids decided whether or not they were going to keep wearing masks at school, I had them read this piece by Caplan.)
The venturesome people of the past – those who led us into the great trading enterprises and the Industrial Revolution that has improved so many people’s lives worldwide -- would not have embarked on their journeys if they couldn’t rely on the good math that charted not only their direction while navigating, but also sound insurance rates for what they needed to insure. As Peter Bernstein writes in his book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk:
Venturesome people place high utility on the small probability of huge gains and low utility on the larger probability of loss. Others place little utility on the probability of gain because their paramount goal is to preserve their capital. Where one sees sunshine, the other sees a thunderstorm.
Incidentally, the exaggeration of risk may also have a disproportionate impact on boys. As Richard Reeves writes in his book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It:
Men, for example, have a greater appetite for risk. This is not a social construct. It can be identified in every known society throughout history, as Joyce Benenson shows in her book Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes. “Sex differences exist in virtually every area in which risk has been studied, with males engaging in more risk-taking than females” write a team of scholars studying leadership styles. “Similar findings have been reported from hunter gatherers to bank CEOs.”
That book, and related issues, will be the subject of our next series of essays.