Book review: "Risk" by Dan Gardner

June 11, 2026

People are notoriously bad at assessing risk. That is, at correctly distinguishing between decisions based on fact and those based on opinion, or to put it another way, decisions based on the head and those on the gut. We tend to overrate some risks and underrate others, often without any apparent logical basis.

I remember travelling from Sydney to Brisbane by train to attend a conference. I know at least one other person made an interstate train trip but most of the delegates who came from outside Queensland travelled by air. Many of the locals drove to the conference venue.

Most people will be aware of Australia's exemplary record of air travel safety. It is in fact the safest means of transport in Australia, including walking or being pushed in a pram, when calculated by fatal incidents per passenger kilometre. 1,355 people died in road accidents across Australia in 2025 and around 800 people died on the road between Sydney and Brisbane in the two decades before I made my trip north. On my train trip I passed through places where more than a hundred people have died in rail accidents over the last few years (Glenbrook, Cowan and Granville).

The surprising thing is that the form of travel most feared by people is going by air, the safest form of all. There is a good business in providing Fear of Flying courses and everyone is worried about the dreadful effects of jet lag and stroke from deep vein thrombosis. Whenever an air crash is reported in the news there are flight cancellations in the ensuing weeks. Contrast this with the fact that despite constant advertising about road safety people continue to drive without seat belts or when intoxicated. The train trip from Brisbane to Sydney takes longer than the plane flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, but I have never heard anyone express concern about deep vein thrombosis on the train.

Some examples from the jacket blurb.

Part of the problem is a combination of familiarity and what the psychologists call availability. For most people, the frequency of reading about or seeing images of plane crashes is greater than the frequency that they actually get to sit in a plane, and those reports and images are always very graphic, with survival often attributed to a miracle. Car travel, on the other hand, is something we do all the time and even though we see the safety advertisements most people don't know anyone or know very few who have been killed in a car. We know from personal experience that car travel is safe so the warnings are ignored. Commuters catch trains ten times a week so again they can use their gut to tell them that train travel is safe. I lived at Penrith at the time of the Granville train crash in 1977 and everybody I knew in the area knew at least one person who died, but we all got back on the train the next day to go to work.

As well as the constant barrage of information about car safety which seems to be ignored there are other well publicised health risks which are widely ignored. Smoking kills many times as many Australians (about 24,000) as cars do but people still smoke, and nobody could be unaware of the dangers of cigarettes.

So we have very well publicised dangers which are ignored by a large proportion of the population, but the really strange thing is how the public reacts to dangers which are not publicised by scientists or responsible government authorities but by people with no qualifications or with agendas to promote or books to sell.

The archetypical example of books by unqualified people which exaggerate dangers and yet are readily accepted by large numbers as identifying real risks are diet books. I have in my collection two books (with coincidentally the same title - "Sweet Poison") warning of the dangers of aspartame and fructose respectively. Both have had very good sales and have generated wide public comment and concern about the deadliness of the two chemicals in question, but both are written by authors with no training in either science or nutrition.

Alternative medicine relies on faulty perception of risk for its survival. As an example, I am often told that the fact that a drug is only available on prescription means that it is inherently extremely dangerous, but of the two drugs I carry with me when I travel (metformin and paracetamol) the prescription-only one has no known toxic dose but a deadly amount of the over-the-counter drug can be bought in any supermarket for less than ten dollars.

And don't get me started on the insane campaign to convince the world that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent. If you have never seen the effects of polio it's easy to say that the vaccine isn't useful or necessary.

See also: The girl in the iron lung

But back to the book in question. It is an exhaustive coverage of the misunderstanding of risk. The blurb on the back gives some examples, but the table of contents shows the extent of the coverage of the problem.

The Risk Society
Of Two Minds
Stone Age meets Information Age
Nothing More Than Feelings
A Story About Numbers
The Herd Senses Danger
Fear Inc
All the Fear That’s Flt to Print
Crime and Perceptron
The Chemistry of Fear
Terrified of Terrorism
Conclusion: There’s never been a better time to be alive

There is also a comprehensive bibliography at the back of the book where a lot more in formation about the subject can be found.

The book might have been first published in 2008 but it is still relevant today. To get a copy you will have to ask your favourite librarian to locate a copy for inter-library loan but it will be worth the effort.

Highly recommended.

See also: "How to Poison Your Spouse the Natural Way" by Jay D. Mann PhD for another look at risk.