Thinking About Risk

Risk assessment is one of those hardy perennials–the kind of story that comes back again and again in virtually the same form. Not long ago I met David Ropeik, author of a new book, How Risky Is It Really?  Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts, that reprises much of the analysis of risk misperception that the late Aaron Wildavsky pioneered back in the 1980s (see especially Wildavsky’s book with Mary Douglas, Risk and Culturea true classic).

I decided to sit down and do a very short video (2:47 long) with David setting out a few summary points of how he thinks about this issue for the environmentaltrends.org site where I am the grand poohbah, but it’s also suitable for Power Line:

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