Americans Are Irrationally Afraid Of COVID Because The Ruling Class Has Demonized Risk

[mystery-ak]

 Americans Are Irrationally Afraid Of COVID Because The Ruling Class Has Demonized Risk

'Why do so many vaccinated people remain fearful?' David Leonhardt asks with a straight face in Monday's New York Times newsletter. Let me tell you.

By Kylee Zempel
April 20, 2021

“Why do so many vaccinated people remain fearful?” David Leonhardt asks with a straight face in Monday’s New York Times morning newsletter about “Irrational Covid Fears.”

Leonhardt opens with a story about judge and Yale University law professor Guido Calabresi, who for 30 years has been telling his students a tale he crafted about a god who came to society to propose an invention that would make their lives better in nearly every way. It would afford them extra quality time with loved ones and enable them to see sights and perform tasks they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.

The cost? The god would select 1,000 young people to strike dead.

The professor would then pose the question to his students: Would you take the deal? The students’ answer would almost always be no. “What’s the difference between this and the automobile?” Calabresi would ask, revealing the moral of the story.

Leonhardt concludes in the Times that we accept the cost of automobile fatalities because it has always been an aspect of our lives. A world without cars and thus the risks they carry is a world we really just can’t imagine for ourselves. Our comfortability with vehicles, Leonhardt says, is an example of human irrationality when calculating risks. While people tend to focus on minuscule risks such as airplane crashes or shark attacks, we gloss over much riskier activities such as driving.

more
https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/20/americans-are-irrationally-afraid-of-covid-because-the-ruling-class-has-demonized-risk/

[PeteS in CA]

The ideas that things can be done without drawbacks or can be risk-free have been steeped into US culture for decades.

As with many/most attempts to steer a sane course between insane extremes, trying to find and speak, to the best of one's knowledge, of the reality between Covid-panic and Covid-denial gets flak from adherents of both extremes.

[DB]

The fruit of lawyers over time.

[Bigun]