As in: Reading

I read Steven Levitt's Freakonomics last week—a very interesting use of statistics to answer questions you normally won't think of economists asking. One chapter focuses on parenting and an interesting dilemma:

No one is more susceptible to an expert's fearmongering than a parent. Fear is in fact a major component of the act of parenting. A parent, after all, is the stweard of another creature's life, a creature who in the beginning is more helpless than the newborn of nearly any other species. This leads a lot of parents to spend a lot of their parenting energy simply being scared.

The problem is that they are often scared of the wrong things. It's not their fault, really. Separating facts from rumors is always hard work, especially for a busy parent. And the white noise generated by the experts—to say nothing of the pressure exerted by fellow parents—is so overwhelming that they can barely think for themselves. The facts they do manage to glean have usually been varnished or exaggerated or otherwise taken out of context to serve an agenda that isn't their own.

[For example, while most people feel that a home with guns is more dangerous than a home with pools, the] likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn't even close: [a child] is roughly 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident ... than [from] gunplay.(150)

Levitt argues that very often experts use their expertise to take advantage of those who don't have it. In the parenting world, they use fear to sell stuff.

Most innovations in the field of child safety are affiliated with—shock of shocks—a new product to be marketed.... These products are often a response to some growing scare in which ... the outrage outweighs the hazard. Compare the four hundred lives that a few swimming pool precautions might save to the number of lives saved by far noisier crusades (153).

It's the "experts" lesson that I find most intriguing about the book—Levitt pretty much says you can't trust experts to be straight with you. Their expertise is their power. Makes sense, but kinda depressing. Posted by briley at May 24, 2005 5:55 AM