Panicology
SIMON BRISCOE and
HUGH ALDERSEY-WILLIAMS
VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2008
Copyright © Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams, 2008
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
978-0-14-191265-3
To the next generation –
Marjolaine, Sam and Roch –
who will live with the consequences of our actions.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Sex, Marriage and Children
The Birth Dearth
Family Breakdown
The Marriage Squeeze
Something for the Weekend?
2. Health
The Fat Thing
Currying Flavour
A Dead Duck
It’s Amazing What They Can Do
Completing the Course
Sudden Death
3. Passing the Time
Art Is Dangerous
Cheers!
The Death of Cinema
Collectors’ Agony
4. Social Policy
Golden Oldies’ Time Bomb
Never Never Finances
The Housing Bubble
Migrant Invasion
Losing Control of Your Vehicle
Death by Phone
5. The Workplace
No Work or Low Pay
Underpaid Women
It’s All Too Much
Games of Chance
6. Law and Order
Terror Alert
Bang Bang
Lock ’Em Up
Murder and Crime
7. The Natural World
Looking Up
The Short, Hot Summer of 2006
Becoming Unsettled
Pigs Might Swim
Go with the Flow
Chilling News
8. Our Declining Resources
Wild Talk
The Cod Delusion
Not a Word
9. Modern Science
Frankenstein Foods
Little Wonder
Exposed
10. They’re Coming to Get You
Expecting Visitors
That’s When It Hits You
A Sceptic’s Toolkit
Notes
How the English and Welsh Die
Acknowledgements
Many people confided their favourite scare stories to us as we set about work on this book, and we are grateful to them for their efforts in persuading us to share their fears. Family members dutifully scanned the newspapers for appropriate alarums, gave helpful pointers or at least allowed us space to write. Our erstwhile chemistry teacher Mike Morelle surprised us with a fat file of cuttings that he had apparently been keeping on the off-chance that two of his ex-pupils might write this book. Thank you all, and particularly to our wives – Moira and Laure – for their support. A number of libraries and media databases greatly facilitated our searches. We would like to thank especially the librarians of the Royal Society of Arts, the University of East Anglia and Cambridge University. Huge thanks to staff at the Financial Times for supplying inspiration – and allowing Simon time off to work on the book.
We sought out experts who might inform our potential fears. The following were exceptionally generous with their time, expertise and contacts: John Adams, Tony Allan, David Berube, Petra Boynton, Tracey Brown, Derek Burke, Ian Burnett, Clark Chapman, Mike Clark, Piers Corbyn, Julian Dowdeswell, Greg Durocher, Marie Edmonds, Kerry Emanuel, Andrew Evans, Pamela Ewan, Brian T. Foley, Kenneth R. Foster, Fiona Fox, Elspeth Garman, David Gee, Mike Hulme, Peter Lachmann, Chris Landsea, John Lawton, Stephen Leatherman, Georgina Mace, Jonathan Matthews, Bill McGuire, Jeffrey McNeely, Clare Mills, Julia Moore, Lynne Moxon, Kenneth L. Mossman, Brigitte Nerlich, Lembit Opik, Julian Orford, Stephen Pacala, Hugh Pennington, Raj Persaud, Roger Pielke, Richard Robertson, Jonathan Shanklin, Tom Stewart, Karen Talbot, Chris Tyler, Craig Wallace, Brian Wynne. We are grateful to all of them. Tony Lacey at Penguin deserves special thanks for his guidance.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams and Simon Briscoe
May 2007
Introduction
‘This book made me feel sick. It also, equally effectively, made me feel ashamed, despondent and anxious, increasingly disenchanted with our politicians and, above all, guilty… this invaluable book.’
This review appeared in a serious broadsheet newspaper. The book happens to be about overfishing, but it could just as well be about global warming, family breakdown or hospital superbugs. Observe not merely the dire mental turmoil that the book induces, but the reviewer’s pathetic gratitude at being brought into this state. As a personal response, it is a touch overwrought, but it is typical of the way increasingly we are all invited to feel about the endless catalogue of disasters that are supposed to await us.
Our book won’t make you feel these things. With luck, it may even make you feel a little happier about the condition of the world.
Consider bird flu. Throughout the winter of 2005–6, this was billed as an impending human pandemic that would wipe out a large proportion of the Earth’s population. Yet the H5N1 type of the flu virus has led to the deaths of fewer than 300 people worldwide, mostly in Asia where victims had come in direct contact with infected birds.
Still the media is intent on sustaining scare stories like this everywhere it can – and we lap them up.
Some days, of course, not much happens, and even the media is stumped for a scare story. Actually, not much happened throughout the whole of 2006, the year we began work on this book, and into 2007. No suicidal zealots flew passenger jets into high-rise buildings. No hurricane destroyed a major city. No killer wave arose casually to sweep away a couple of hundred thousand shore-dwelling souls. No new plague struck. We live in a complex world and we don’t want to die. And in general we are winning the battle – we are living longer and more healthily than ever. Every year, death comes a year closer for all of us, meanwhile life gets a little better for many people. So why are we happy to panic about the silliest things?
This tendency is certainly not new. Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841, catalogued public obsessions with witchcraft, mesmerism and tulips, as well as fears of annihilation by everything from flooding to chemical poisons. Today, read paedophiles, radiation and blueberries… and flooding and chemical poisons. These topics are not ‘hard’ news or exactly fact, even if they do have a basis in fact. They live as stories because we all love to gossip, hear a tale, embellish it and retell it. Journalism is industrialized gossip, as Andrew Marr puts it.1 Once one newspaper’s story about something extraordinary, say a killer-bee, has gone down well, others follow, rooting out killer-bee-related items that would otherwise have gone unreported, or building up killer-bee near-misses into full-blown dramas in their own right. The fact is that we love to be scared – which is why many of the topics we examine (and the bees) have their own disaster movies.
These news stories frequently give the impression that life as we know it is about to end. The nature of the threat may change – a wave of immigration, AIDS, rising sea levels or an asteroid – but the threat is always there. Mackay notes how an ‘epidemic terror of the end of the world has several times spread over the nations’.2 It has happened at regular intervals since before the rise of modern science and has continued following the Industrial Revolution. And it seems it is happening still – in some cases changing our behaviour and leading to emotional and financial costs.
What’s new, then, is not the public’s appetite for a good panic story, or the media’s willingness to serve one up. It’s the role of other agencies. A generation ago, there were concerns in the world and these were reflected in the media, but the tone was different. Individual accounts of gruesome events may have been both more factual and more bloodthirsty than would be allowed today, but the tone would have been sober, and behind it all would have been the reassuring presence of a paternalistic government.
Today, that comfort blanket has been whipped away. Now politicians and government officials seem more likely to add to our sense of panic about a given issue. And even if our public servants don’t, then there are plenty of other highly vocal interest groups – scientists, health and safety nuts, corporations and their advertising agencies, non-governmental organizations and lobby groups – who will.
Governments have a duty to warn us of dangers that they perceive, but the way they do it today often only seems to add to the alarm. They are keener than ever to regulate for a safer and fairer world wherever there might be the slightest risk to health. An initial, well-intentioned impact assessment can rapidly snowball into a firmly held policy view supported by the full weight of government. Modern-day communications in our globalized world bring us stories more rapidly than ever before. Recent years have seen government campaigns in many countries about terrorism and bird flu which have raised our fears. But we never really learn the genuine extent of the risks; nor are we told what we as individuals can do to reduce them – we are merely told to be alert – that is to say, on the edge of panic.
The courts have also helped to alter our perception of what is a reasonable risk, sometimes in laughable ways. In the more litigious parts of the world such as the United States, the old rule of ‘buyer beware’ has been sidelined – now the seller gets sued. Following a lawsuit, McDonald’s has had to print a warning on its coffee cups pointing out that the contents may be ‘extremely hot’. As we witness the death of common sense, children’s playgrounds lose their more exhilarating rides and doctors cover their professional reputations by putting patients through unnecessary tests. The end result is a distortion in our fears that overlooks evidence in favour of sensation: we now fear fires more than drowning even though more people die from drowning simply because fires make better television.
The classic social scientist’s equation has it that the risk of an event is the likelihood of its happening multiplied by the impact if it does. So the risk of being killed by a volcanic eruption or a terrorist attack depends on the odds of the event, the event’s magnitude, your proximity to it, your protection against it, and so on. But a more recent formula begins to take account of the way the media and other agencies are raising the stakes, suggesting that risk = hazard × outrage.3 This is simplistic, but it clearly admits an important new factor. Governments advise against visits to places they judge to be at risk from terrorist attack but are less concerned about volcanic hotspots because only the former provokes outrage.
The topics we have chosen show how this wide societal network now manipulates our perception of risks. We have selected some global and some local concerns, some that are easy to understand and others for which the state of knowledge is low. All of them have been prominent stories in the media. We have scored each topic using a points system to show how vividly each threat is portrayed in the media, how real the threat is and how much we as individuals can do about it. Some of these subjects you may be worried about already. To others you may never have given a thought. However, by parading so many popular fears between these covers, we hope at least to show that you cannot worry about everything, and also that it is foolish to worry excessively about any one issue.
We have neglected many risks – including the things that are likely to get you, such as cancer, heart disease, dementia or simply falling. We might have discussed the nuclear threat – it has not gone away. We might have dealt with environmental pollution, still a major concern though no longer the public mania that it was a generation ago. Rightly or wrongly, these risks do not give rise to much panic these days, and so we have put them aside.
Examining panics en masse, we begin to pick out common threads not seen when they are considered, as they generally are, in isolation. There is a general difficulty in accepting that natural events still have the power occasionally to overwhelm us. At the same time, there is an almost biblical inclination to blame ourselves for things that may not be our fault, such as new viruses or freak weather events. There is a fear of forces that (we believe) we ourselves have unleashed through our arrogant scientific optimism. There is disbelief at the limitations of medical science, expressed in outrage at the deaths of infants or the presence of bacteria in hospitals. There is a growing distrust of the government hand.
Above all, there is a paradox. Modern life has greatly reduced many of the risks that humankind has to face, and yet it is modern life that seems to spawn most of our fears – fears of chemical, biological and nuclear war, pollution, terrorism, climate change and, less directly, fears associated with immigration, ageing, loss of cultural diversity and much else besides.
As we said, 2006 was a quiet year. There were merely the millions of expected deaths from malaria, HIV, poor water quality, war and car accidents. Searching the internet, it is almost impossible to discover how many died during the year from flu – the sort disingenuously dubbed ‘seasonal’, as if there was not a damned thing anybody can do about it – because the figure (as many as 500,000 people) is all but lost amid completely hypothetical death tolls for the bird flu pandemic that did not happen.
We notice spectacular or novel disasters, but neglect familiar killers. This is human nature. But another reason for this is the genuine gap in our knowledge of risks. The media, just like the public, attempts to navigate the daily news flow relating to global warming or the state of immigration, but, again like the public, has no means of knowing what is right or wrong. The queues forming outside branches of the Northern Rock bank in Britain in the late summer of 2007 reeked of poorly informed panic about money. And the problem gets worse as time moves on. New and increasingly complex technologies beyond the comprehension of most bring new risks as business may be threatened by internet-based markets or our health jeopardized by nanoparticles. Breast cancer is bad, but there are serious risks associated with just screening for the disease. In cases like these, what we would like is a quantitative statement of Robert K. Merton’s famous law of unanticipated consequences: how great
are these consequences compared to the negative impact of the original problem and the positive impact of its technological solution? But of course this figure is seldom calculable. Sometimes, side-effects are negligible; other times, they seem greater than the original problem.
Still, we can take heart from what we do know. Not many of the dangers we confront are absolute – very few are likely to kill many people. Most are relative risks – things like eating too much salt that might knock a few years off your life or a flood that might result in the loss of treasured possessions and a tedious insurance claim. Yet academic studies of happiness suggest that it is the relative risks that matter to us. As the world becomes more complex and we grow better informed about events, we worry more about these relative risks. But how relative are they?
Numbers are the ‘fact’ generator in today’s society and numbers are the currency in any debate about risk. But they are not all of equal quality – some are manipulated by governments while others are produced by people with a vested interest. Often, proper figures don’t exist – they are opinion surveys or come from administrative systems that do not give us data on the definition we want, leading to poor policy and weaker assessment. Yet those who wish to make a point on television or in the newspapers do it using numbers. Sound-bite statistics, sometimes invented and often inaccurate, seize the imagination even if they crumble under close inspection. What does a one-in-a-thousand chance of catching SARS actually mean? Where in the world are you? What precautions are you taking? Are you of a vulnerable age?
Figures are one of the main ways to spread fear. We might like to think that the figures are the hard facts, the irrefutable hard-cooked foundation for the argument, but sadly they are often not. They can be misleading or deliberately distorting. As John Allen Paulos puts it in his 1988 book Innumeracy, ‘Mathematics is the quintessential way to make impressive-sounding claims which are devoid of factual content.’4
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