Comment on Vote Qualifications, Not Issues

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:07:09 GMT

Well, you also need to factor in the severity of the threat, as well as the risk of it happening.

Since the era of cheap international travel, there have been about 20 new flu subtypes, and one of those killed 50 million people (the Spanish flu, one of the greatest natural disasters ever), with a couple of others killing a few million. Plus, having almost everyone infected with a severe illness tends to disrupt society.

So to me that looks like there is a substantial risk (bigger than 1%) of something quite bad happening when a new subtype appears.

Given how difficult it is to predict biological systems, I think it makes sense to treat the arrival of a new flu subtype with concern and for governments to set up contingency programmes. That's not to say that the media didn't hype swine flu and bird flu, but that doesn't mean that the government preparations were an overreaction.

That's not to say that some threats aren't exaggerated, and others (low-probability, global threats like asteroid strikes or big volcanic eruptions) don't get enough attention.

I wouldn't put much trust in Matt Ridley's abilities to estimate risk:

Mr Ridley told the Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday, that the bank had been hit by "wholly unexpected" events and he defended the way he and his colleagues had been running the bank.

"We were subject to a completely unprecedented and unpredictable closure of the world credit markets," he said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7052828.stm (yes, it's the same Matt Ridley)

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