By Thomas R. DeGregori
Posted: Monday, January 1, 2001
ARTICLES
Publication Date: January 1, 2001
The evidence is superabundant that modern humans are healthier and more long-lived than were humans at any other historical time. Yet it seems that the safer humans in general become, the less safe citizens of developed countries feel.
Wrong Is Right—and Left
Not long ago in the arena of American politics, conservatives were likelier than others to display a lack of confidence in scientific and technological innovations, while liberals tended to welcome, even to champion, such innovations. Between the late 1960s and early '70s, however, the latter players were seduced by counterculturalists, extremist environmentalists, and others into a fear of modern technology and its products. And since the Reagan era, conservatives of the Jack Kemp and Julian Simon variety have often become boosters of new technologies. Social conservatives, meanwhile, have nurtured fears and phobias about modern life that are characteristically theirs, most of which pertain to suppositions of moral deterioration and societal breakdown.
Although some unfounded health fears concerning modern living are much more prevalent in some sociopolitical quarters than in others, such fears in America are not reasonably categorizable by ideology. The incidence of fears typical of food faddists and nutrition cultists, for instance, apparently has increased across the political spectrum in the United States. For example, while most public criticisms of the chemical technologies of food production come from the Left, the actual sites of so-called health food stores and the prices at which they offer their goods together suggest that many conservative suburbanites are closet technophobic food faddists.
Sociology professor Barry Glassner, the author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (Basic Books, 1999), is clearly a liberal. In this book he focuses on fears propagated by the Right, but he notes that in public political discourse both liberals and conservatives traffic in unfounded fears, including health fears, concerning opponents' policies. Glassner shows that America's collective unfounded fears and phobias have repeatedly resulted in enormous public expenses, and in mandates for large private expenses, to correct minor or nonexistent problems while more important problems have been disregarded. A similar book could be written, with the same title and subtitle, from a right-wing perspective, dealing mainly with the leftist spreading of ill-founded fears as a contributor to massive wasting of taxpayers' money.
When an open-ended 'category' such as 'road rage' is introduced through a mass medium, nonscientists—plus assorted partisans, vested interests, and special interests—tend to label widely dissimilar things as members of the supposed category.
Preteen Homicides, 'Road Rage,' and the Fearsome Media
Glassner describes many popular unfounded health fears; cites many of the idiotic statements that propagators of such fears have made; and, with solid evidence, refutes the fears he describes and debunks the myths associated with them. For example, there is no sound evidence that "road rage" exists as a discrete disorder. And, while there have been clusters of children's killing of children (i.e., cases in which such killing was or seemed frequent and/or localized), perhaps related to the availability of automatic firearms, homicide by preteens in the U.S. is less frequent than it was in the mid-1960s, when many of today's parents were schoolchildren. Moreover, for any child of school age in the U.S. at any time of any day, there has long been no safer place than a school.
Many of the unfounded health fears that Glassner contests in The Culture of Fear—e.g., concerning asbestos (he correctly notes that keeping it in place would often have made for less of a hazard than has removing it), silicone breast implants, and electromagnetic fields and cancer—have been criticized by others, but seldom as wittily as Glassner attacks them.
A standard op-ed procedure of risk analysts is to present data from opinion surveys on the public's beliefs concerning health risks comparatively with experts' opinions and/or with statistics on real-life health risks. Regrettably, most journalists apparently do not approach health stories accordingly.
Glassner provides plausible hypotheses concerning mechanisms by which statistically rare events become popularly regarded as societally pervasive. Ac-cording to Glassner, the media definitely contributes to fearmongering, which has become a TV-newsmagazine staple. For example, a segment on "road rage" may well begin with footage along the lines of an ordinary-looking adult doing nothing other than innocently backing a car out of a driveway—an almost universal act among suburbanites in the U.S. Such an opening would alone render a "road rage" piece nonjournalism—more specifically, a misleading representation of what can, but almost certainly won't, happen to one.
In the public arena, exploiters of substandard science and pseudoscience . . . can more comfortably affirm oversimplifications, over-extrapolations, and guesswork than can dedicated scientists.
When an open-ended "category" such as "road rage" is introduced through a mass medium, nonscientists—plus assorted partisans, vested interests, and special interests—tend to label widely dissimilar things as members of the supposed category. They can thus give rarities the appearance of being epidemic. Once there is a corps of ostensible experts on the pseudo-category, any fears it has engendered will persist even after a Glassner has bared its nature.
In the U.S., nationwide newscasting and its Internet equivalent are round-the-clock; broadcast media will cover any tragic event of American magnitude (a school massacre, for example) cyclically; and reportage of the event typically climaxes in late-day network TV broadcasts, when most Americans are neither at work nor attending school. Such broadcasts probably put the fear in most American parents that their children may similarly become victims, and one can readily sympathize with this fear. But, as Glassner argues, when a genuine expert on the question describes, in an interview on National Public Radio, the tragic event as anomalous and the trend of events in its category as downward, the interviewer's tone becomes incredulous. In the public arena, the communication of rock-solid evidence and scientific expertise dims beside blitzes of on-the-scene media reporting by biased personalities.
Disease Clusters
In the public arena, exploiters of substandard science and pseudoscience often have more appeal than do practicing scientists who are competent and ethical—partly because such exploiters can more comfortably affirm oversimplifications, over-extrapolations, and guesswork than can dedicated scientists. Scientists are by training circumspect in matters of science and tend to address questions of cause and effect statistically, in probabilities. For example, a mainstream scientist may regard as foolish the claim that a particular chemical causes (or promotes, or cures) cancer, but publicly may well describe the claim merely as unlikely or as simplistic (either of which description may strike the public as equivocal); a fringe scientist or pseudoscientist, on the other hand, may consider the claim possible (and/or expedient) and therefore present it with a sense of certainty as meriting the attention of the public, the media, the government, and the biomedical and public health communities.
In epidemiology, the oft-misinterpreted word "cluster" refers to an occurrence characterized by any particular health-related event's being—or seeming—frequent and/or localized. Apparently, laypersons generally infer from the labeling of an occurrence (e.g., of cancers) as a "cluster" that the cause of the occurrence is necessarily local and probably an errant industrial chemical. They also apparently widely misbelieve that the distribution of the events constituting any chance multiple occurrence of disease cannot be irregular, and that therefore seeming anomalies such as disease clusters are not reasonably ascribable to chance alone. Unlike statisticians, most laypersons appear unaware that chance clusters are to be expected. Thus, the public health expert who informs a frightened community that chance is the only possible explanation consistent with scientific evidence will probably find himself unwelcome, if not abhorred, among the nonscientists and assorted health cranks of that community. Indeed, in the U.S. millions of dollars of scarce public health funds are squandered to find the causes of disease clusters that are sensibly ascribable to chance.
DPT Vaccination
Glassner cites the hysterics over claims that DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccination is harmful to show how unfounded fears can result in unhealthful, even perilous, acts. Vaccination as a class has saved hundreds of millions of lives and has eradicated one of human-kind's most horrible diseases, smallpox.
In the event that a seemingly healthy child dies or develops a wretched nervous disorder 24-48 hours after undergoing DPT vaccination and his or her parents blame the DPT shot for the calamity, one could easily understand the reason for their ascription—even (as often occurs) if all available scientific evidence showed that a very different description of causation was much likelier. In any case, the number of persons DPT shots allegedly have killed or seriously harmed is minuscule beside the number of persons who have died of whooping cough (pertussis) because of lack of the vaccine or because of ill-advised parental rejection of inoculation.
In the U.S. millions of dollars of scarce public health funds are squandered to find the causes of disease clusters that are sensibly ascribable to chance.
Glassner notes that Americans handled the DPT-shot issue reasonably and nonlitigiously: Congress mandated a small tax on the vaccine to fund compensative payouts to alleged victims of DPT vaccination. The matter of how insurance might moderate health fears bears exploring.
Vested Interests, True Believers, and Breast Implants
Glassner also shows that various groups have a vested interest in frightening American citizenry and in perpetuating unfounded fears. He neglects, however, that many sincere true believers work in concert with vested interests to frighten the public. Persons of all political stripes can have deep-seated, conscientious misbeliefs that are contrary to a wealth of excellent evidence. If left-of-center individuals can harbor gross misconceptions about modern technology, it should be understandable that individuals who are more conservative might fearfully—and baselessly—believe, say, that "politically correct" academics are ousting Shakespearean literature from college curricula. Yet in masterfully exposing the bombast and pomposities of the pundits who bemoan America's alleged moral degeneration, Glassner at times is not charitable enough concerning their motives.
Further, I must challenge his take on an important issue. Glassner clearly recognizes that fears about silicone breast implants are almost entirely unfounded and that—despite massive evidence that they cause no physical harm except for occasional limited (local) complications—many persons have profited from the publicizing of claims that such implants are harmful. Scientists who have conducted research on silicone breast implants and have found that they are not harmful have been subpoenaed on their work. Glassner correctly shows that, often, in consequence of their honest, scientifically valid testimonies, these scientists are harassed into discontinuing breast-implant research.
He slips up, however, when he tries to explain why liberals and feminists have upheld breast-implant hype, hokum, and hogwash in the face of copious evidence from reputable sources. According to him, conservatives are using breast-implant lawsuits to justify fashioning draconian laws that would restrict citizens' ability to have authentic grievances redressed judicially, and thus liberals, feminists, and others opposed to such restriction are honor bound to defend what is reasonably indefensible. But to do so would be not just immoral but foolish as well. The best defense against draconian tort-law "reform" would be a movement to enlighten the public on science, pseudoscience, and fearsome propaganda.
The health writer Malcolm Gladwell, whom Glassner calls a "great journalist-debunker," has suggested that the propagation of unfounded fearsome claims such as those concerning silicone breast implants engenders not only huge expenditures, but also terror among those who suppose they are at risk. Those whom Glassner quotes on the alleged harmfulness of silicone breast implants probably believe in such harmfulness. His book shows that persons who are generally sane can believe preposterous claims. Alleged child sexual abuse at daycare centers is a case in point that Glassner covers. As he recognizes, some of the most trenchant exposures of the injustice of daycare-provider convictions came from a conservative, Dorothy Rabinowitz, in The Wall Street Journal.
The Bottom Line
Wasting tens of billions of dollars to prevent and remedy problems that are nominal—purely suppositious—means that less money is available for endeavors that could improve and lengthen every American's life.
ACSH advisor Thomas R. DeGregori, Ph.D., is a professor of economics at the University of Houston, in Houston, Texas. His Web homepage is http://www.uh.edu/~trdegreg.
(From Priorities, Vol. 12, No. 1)
