ON RISK TAKING
An article in the Saturday Evening Post gave me a different slant on risk-taking. Consider the following statistics: Many people fear dying in a plane crash. Yet the odds against that are 100,000 to 1. Statistically, a person is more likely to be kicked to death by a donkey than to die in a plane crash. Fear of being murdered is also extremely high, yet a person is 8 times more likely to die while playing a sport than to be shot by a stranger. A third great fear is that of surgery – of dying on the operating table. But once again, the chances of death there are tiny (1 in 40,000), compared with the risk of driving a car on a daily basis (1 in 4,000). When it comes to taking risks, most of us were curiously irrational. Millions of people buy lottery tickets, even though we were 3 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to…
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