Putting Money Where Our Fear Is

an excerpt from my book, Beyond Reason

Another way to put this [i.e. our excessive fear of terrorism] into perspective is to look at the amount of money we spend on terrorism prevention - about $1 trillion dollars in the years since 9/11. This enormous figure includes only expenditures on homeland security; it does not include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Using anti-terrorism spending as a benchmark, if we allocated resources to preventing threats in direct proportion to their actual likelihood of occurring, every ten years we’d spend $14.5 quadrillion on preventing car accidents. That’s about 750 times the annual Gross Domestic Product of the United States. We’d spend $3.5 quadrillion (about 185 times GDP) on preventing cancer; $122 trillion (about 6.5 times GDP) on preventing bathtub drownings; and $4 trillion (20 percent of GDP) on preventing venomous bee, wasp, and hornet stings.

In other words, if we reacted to every potential danger in proportion to the actual level of threat it poses, using our fear of terrorism as the standard, our society would come to a fearful halt. We would all live in mortal dread of lightning strikes and snakebites. No one would ever get on a plane, or get in the car, or leave the house, or even take a bath.