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Danger of a pandemic

Olga Jonas's picture


On February 15, 2013, an asteroid 45 meters across sailed past the Earth at 4.9 miles a second.  This was the closest encounter on record with an asteroid this big. Such rare events trigger fear because people overestimate the risk of unusual events – at least for a while. The odds of other rare events are often underestimated. People have a hard time understanding frequencies that are longer than a human lifetime; politicians discount probabilities of disasters that are unlikely to hit while they are in office and so they underinvest in prevention. In sum, we have trouble assessing low-probability, high-impact risks – the kind of events dubbed as Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. 

Responding to concerns about the asteroid, The Economist (Danger of death! Feb. 14, 2013) created a graphic to illustrate how we are unlikely to die from asteroid impact (odds of one in 75,000,000). The chart showed that more prosaic, but still rare, dangers were worse.  For instance, 27 people died in 2008 in America from contact with dogs (a one in 11,000,000 chance of death).  The ranking also showed the odds of death in any given year from a range of causes, such as heart disease, choking, falling down stairs, cycling, and bee stings.


Adam Wagstaff's picture



Some bad news—resources are finite


So what exactly is the “science of delivery”?

Adam Wagstaff's picture



The Impact of the Global Food Crisis on Self-Assessed Food Security

Derek Headey's picture

Has the rise in international food prices since the mid 2000s hurt the poor, or helped them? Until recently, everything we knew about this topic came from simulation analyses rather than survey data. Simulation approaches invariably predict that poverty and food insecurity increases as the result of higher food prices, but there are many reasons why these predictions might not eventuate. On the other hand, standard household surveys yield information only after  long lag periods. In light of these constraints, in some of my work I use an indicator of self-assessed food security from the Gallup World Poll (GWP). Since 2005, Gallup has survey men and women in a large number of developing countries and asked them (among other things) whether they have had “any trouble affording sufficient food in the last 12 months?” I take the percentage of respondents who answer yes to this question as a measure of national food insecurity.


Adam Wagstaff's picture




Does a wife's bargaining power provide more micronutrients to females?

Aminur Rahman's picture


A Sketch of a Ministerial Meeting on Universal Health Coverage

Adam Wagstaff's picture



Human Development and Inequality of Opportunity: a rejoinder to Ferreira

Adam Wagstaff's picture


Some thoughts on human development, equal opportunity, and universal coverage

Adam Wagstaff's picture



Where in the world is a hospitalization least affordable?

Adam Wagstaff's picture


