I think it's quite ridiculous that any author can get away with the obscure clairvoyant claim that people are really irrational and desire to be fearful——it's a claim contrary to primitive animal and human psychology alike. The motivation to go buy products associated with fear has nothing to do with fear itself even when you explicitly define fear as an uncomfortable uncertainty.
The reason to want to know fear, why fearful subjects are even discussed, is the quite natural rational thirst for information about uncertainty. Thus, you would expect them to purchase services that provide information about and that mitigate uncertainty. Much of the financial economy is purposed as a mitigation to uncertainty, because uncertainty causes an inherent inefficient allocation in resources in order to prepare for the uncertain event. If there is uncertainty, the rational agent is forced to prepare for it with capital (be it financial or physical). This causes there to be an unused buffer of resources that cannot be allocated to more pressing utilizations. Instead, the rational agent is obliged to maintain a buffer, and even incur more transactional costs in maintaining that very buffer. Uncertainty is expensive, and the rational agent thus seeks to understand all disturbances to mitigate the cost of uncertainty.
tl;dr The author is actually engaging in the cheap literary trope where the general population lacks rationality and the author is the exception for pointing it out.
No, I don't think the desire to mitigate uncertainty explains it. The reason is simple: fear is about overplaying and exaggerating the risks and uncertainty.
Fear of terrorist attacks is a great example. If you live in the US, that means that over the past 15 years you have been more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than a foreign terrorist attack. Yet a lot of people shit their pants with regards to, say, Islamic terrorism.
Because terrorism is more unpredictable. If you don't want to get struck by lightning, stay inside when it storms, or at least don't stand in the middle of an empty field. If you don't want to be killed by a terrorist, don't go outside at all?
Avoiding terrorism is pretty easy: avoid the busy parts of the largest cities. Nobody is carrying out a terrorist attack in Boise.
Which is ironic that the Americans who appear to be the most fearful of terrorism are the ones who live in places where it will most likely never happen.
Can we agree that the conditions for lightning are fairly predictable, and staying safe is pretty straightforward? Whereas "just don't be where all the people are" is by definition advice that most people can't or won't follow.
Honestly I don't think this point is really debatable. Unpredictability is a core characteristic of terrorism. If tomorrow all Americans decided to spread homogeneously across the country and never congregate in large groups, terrorists would think of something else. If it were predictable and avoidable it wouldn't be as scary, which is the whole point of this conversation.
"The analysis measured not whether a city would make an attractive target to a terrorist but rather how well it could withstand an attack, Piegorsch said."
In other words, Boise is ill-prepared to handle an attack, but no statement is made on the likelihood that it would be a target. That likelihood is, of course, quite low.
For the second, the goals of an individual nut who couldn't even make his plan work aren't all that interesting.
Characterizing my advice as "just don't be where all the people are" is super misleading. There are a small number of likely terrorist targets, and my advice is not to be there. If you're worried about terrorism, then you should probably avoid Manhattan, downtown Boston, major airports, etc. And most people paranoid about terrorism probably already avoid these places. Chicago or Miami or Seattle are probably fine. Places away from the centers of likely target cities are probably fine. "Don't visit New York" is perfectly viable advice for a fearful person in Iowa.
You can easily reduce your risk of being killed by lightning, but remaining perfectly safe is hard. Taking shelter isn't necessarily sufficient. Lightning can conduct into buildings, and it can also start fires.
I don't think the fear of terrorism is down to its unpredictability and unavoidability. The same is true of car crashes (someone else's mistake or malevolence can easily end your life on the road, and avoiding the roads is not an option for the vast majority of people) and yet people give little thought to those.
I was thinking about that comparison of inanimate risks to animate risks and I think the key difference is that one has the power to increase in frequency by sheer will. The other not so much. One creates a victim, another prey as I've read recently @ https://www.city-journal.org/html/lightning-bathtubs-and-ban...
Terrorism is a real threat to interests abroad and test on the ability of the US to mitigate small risks. If they can't mitigate small risks how would they be able to mitigate a large risk? Every single human created disturbance (i.e. war) begins with a small group of people cascading into a larger force, with governments it happens with leaders, but it's greatly more unpredictable when it is propagated by an unknown people–especially when that group is in a region which produces 81.5% of the worlds oil supply. You would be quite irrational to not be interested in the domestic and foreign affairs of your own government. Even more irrational to say it's not a problem.
That's true as far as it goes, but the emphasis on terrorism in the media is wildly disproportionate to the measurable risks. Compare the ubiquity and intensity of anxiety about climate change, whose existential impact is arguably far more widespread and vastly better quantified.
Consider in the light of this discussion that rural voters appear (by inference) to be more concerned about terrorism than urban ones, despite the actual impact of terrorism falling far more heavily on the latter group (unsurprisingly, given the lack of meaningful targets in rural areas).
The article doesn't believe that rural voters are irrational. The article claims that the information given to rural voters falsely portrays terrorism as an active threat to rural voters.
Irrationality is increasingly well supported by empirical evidence from economics and political science.
As for people's motivations to seek out fear-inducing information, you are quite right that some of that is motivated by rsk management but a great deal more of it cannot be explained on utilitarian grounds. freud theorized the existence of a death drive in humans as a correlate of consciousness, suggesting that infants dealt with their anxiety about the intermittent unavailability of their mothers by modeling their anxiety through play so as to assert control over its manifestations.
Freud made a bunch of metaphysical claims that have no evidence whatsoever, hence why modern psychology has completely deviated from his ideas. Economics does not support the view that people are irrational (quite the opposite) and neither does political science.
The reason to want to know fear, why fearful subjects are even discussed, is the quite natural rational thirst for information about uncertainty. Thus, you would expect them to purchase services that provide information about and that mitigate uncertainty. Much of the financial economy is purposed as a mitigation to uncertainty, because uncertainty causes an inherent inefficient allocation in resources in order to prepare for the uncertain event. If there is uncertainty, the rational agent is forced to prepare for it with capital (be it financial or physical). This causes there to be an unused buffer of resources that cannot be allocated to more pressing utilizations. Instead, the rational agent is obliged to maintain a buffer, and even incur more transactional costs in maintaining that very buffer. Uncertainty is expensive, and the rational agent thus seeks to understand all disturbances to mitigate the cost of uncertainty.
tl;dr The author is actually engaging in the cheap literary trope where the general population lacks rationality and the author is the exception for pointing it out.