Freakonomics Entry #5: Statistics and Why Kids Turn Out the Way They Are

The book Freakonomics offers some statistics that are really interesting.  With these statistics is offered an explanation of why people percieve them to be different than they are.  Let's start with a situation that a parent may face.  A mom won't let her daughter play at a girls house because she knows that the family keeps a gun in their home.  But this same mom lets her daughter play at her friends house who has a swimming pool.  Which is more dangerous?  Clearly everyones initial reaction is the gun, but in reality it's the swimming pool.  In a given year there is one drowning for every 11,000 residential pools in the US.  That translated to about 550 children under the age of 10 that drown every year.  Meanwhile, there is merely 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million plus guns.  Since there are about 200 million guns in the US that means that about 175 children under the age of 10 die each year from gun.  The likelyhood of dying from a pool is 1:11,00 as opposed to 1:1 million.  This mothers child is far more likely to die at the friends house with the pool than the gun.  One point that the author made which is very smart is when he says that risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control.  Getting randomly killed by a gun, although extremely rare, is something that you cannot control and therefore makes you afraid of it.  There are a ton of people who are afraid of flying, but not scared of driving a car.  Even though there are about 40 times more car accidents, flying a plane is out of your control.  Another concept that he came up with that was innovative was his simple equation; Risk=hazard+outrage.  When hazard is high and outrage is low, people under react.  The opposite is also true; when hazard is low and outrage is high, they overreact.  So how can we accurately access our risk factor?  We can't because we have pre-concieved notions about everything.