How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

by Vaclav Smil

In his pioneering 1969 analysis of risks, Chauncey Starr—at that time the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California in Los Angeles—stressed the major difference in risk tolerance between voluntary and involuntary activities.20 When people think that they are in control (a perception that may be incorrect but that is based on previous experiences and hence on the belief that they can assess the likely outcome), they engage in activities—climbing vertical rock faces without ropes, skydiving, bullfighting—whose risks of serious injury or fatality may be a thousand-fold higher than the risk associated with such dreaded involuntary exposure as a terrorist attack in a large Western city. And most people have no problem engaging daily and repeatedly in activities that temporarily increase their risk by significant margins: hundreds of millions of people drive every day (and many apparently like to do so), and an even higher risk is tolerated by an even larger number of smokers21—in affluent countries, decades of education has reduced their ranks, but worldwide there are still more than 1 billion of them.