Superfreakonomics: What Should You Worry About?

Imagine you’re playing outside and it starts to rain out of nowhere. Without giving it much thought you continue to play, but minutes later you feel a shooting pain all throughout your body as if you had just been tased. You are lying on the ground unable to move and unaware of what had just happened to you. Several months later you wake in a hospital bed with flowers and family members surrounding you. Little did you know that you were put into a coma after being struck by lightning. Being struck by lightning is a very rare occurrence, but does that mean we still shouldn’t worry about it as much as other things?
According to Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s article “SuperFreakonomics: What Should You Worry About?”, we shouldn’t fear things like this as much as things like cancer. Levitt and Dubner claim that we are “bad at assessing risk” and that we focus on things that are least likely to happen to us verses things that happen on a regular basis. Economics is a key term that they use to explain how we can assess the risks that we are faced with each day. Throughout their article they give us numerous examples and statistics to help prove their point. For example, Levitt and Dubner state that “during all of 2001 there were 68 shark attacks worldwide, of which just four were fatal”, when …show more content…
They bring up the fact that all of the problems we’ve had in the past, have been solvable even if people thought they couldn’t be. Global warming is the issue that we are facing today, and just like before people don’t believe that it will ever be solved. Levitt and Dubner round off the paper stating that “…it is an incredibly large and challenging problem. But, as history has shown us again and again, human ingenuity is bound to be even larger.” I believe this really rounded the paper off