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MIT教授称在美国做总统的概率高于死于空难
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在美国做总统的概率高于死于空难， ——MIT Sloan Professor Arnold Barnett.
Air crash or urban crime—which is more likely to get you?
In the United States from 1994 to 1996 the death risk was 1 in 3.6 million. During that time, The Federal Aviation Administration set a goal of reducing that risk by 80 percent. In 2007, the risk of death was 1 in 32 million, an 89 percent reduction, showing the risk of dying in an air crash is significantly lower in the U.S. today than it was less than 20 years ago.
Barnett compares that statistic to the likelihood of growing up to be president of the United States. Figuring that on average a new president has been elected every 5.3 years since George Washington was first elected, and that currently there are 22 million births every 5.3 years in the U.S., a child’s chance of growing up to be elected president is about 1 in 22 million.
——“An American kid is more likely to grow up to be president than to perish on the next flight,” Barnett says. “That’s one measure of how extraordinary a job has been done” in improving air travel safety.
From another perspective, Barnett offers, if a person flies daily, it would be 88,000 years, on average, before that person dies in an air crash.
The risk of dying as the victim of an urban crime has also declined in recent years.
The 2007 data showed the risk for a black male to be 1 in 23 and the risk for an Asian female to be 1 in 952. The overall lifetime victimization risk in those 50 cities is 1 in 130.
Thus, the chance of being killed in an urban crime is 1 in 130 and the chance of being killed in an air crash is 1 in 32 million.
But homicide is a background tragedy that goes on and on and on and people don’t know too much about it. There’s something odd that we seem to focus on low risk events and pay little attention to risks that are much higher.
For Barnett, this leads to a bigger question.
https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-474462-448308.html
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