Superfreakonomics: What Should You Worry About?

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s article, “SuperFreakonomics: What Should You Worry About?” is a piece that explains what we as humans worry about that aren’t as big of a deal as we think. Levitt and Dubner claim that we are terrible at assessing risk and that we focus more on things like shark attacks and lightning strikes versus things like heart disease which has a more likely chance of doing harm to us. Economics is a key term that they use to explain how we can assess the risks that we are faced with each day. Throughout the article they give us numerous examples to prove the fact that we worry too much. For example, Levitt and Dubner state that “there were 68 shark attacks worldwide, of which just four were fatal”, when the news created a lot of concern to make people think that shark attacks were higher than they have ever been. Levitt and Dubner also use the example of elephants and how “they kill at least 200 people a year”, yet we are less scared of them than sharks.
They also bring up a good point that when we are scared it tends to affect the way we think causing us to think something is worse than it actually is. “Every generation has at least one…problem- the plague,
Now this is not to say that everyone suffers from anxiety, and everyone who does suffer from it has all different forms of it some more severe than others, but we can’t expect people to worry less about something just because it is less common than something else. The worst is when you have someone who suffers from anxiety and someone tells them to just stop thinking about it which only causes them to think about it or worry about it more. The same kind of idea applies to Levitt and Dubners article. Just by telling someone they shouldn’t worry about it doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to worry about it any