Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Cass Sunstein, the Karl

and Lou Ellen Distinguished Service Professor of Juris Prudence at the University of Chicago

Law School. His most recent book is Worst Case Scenarios. Cass, welcome back to Econ Talk.

Thank you so much, a pleasure to be here. Your new book Worst Case Scenarios wrestles with

the difficult question of how we cope as individuals and as a society with low-risk, high-cost

disasters. In the opening chapter, you talk about the human propensity to think of something

as safe or unsafe, but that's often a very unhelpful perspective. Yeah, I think with environmental

risks, risk of crime, risk of terrorism, risk of war, there's the human propensity which

probably has evolutionary roots. Either the thing gets okay, we don't have to worry, or

to have a red danger sign on in your head, which completely takes over. And this is, evolution

may have selected for that, but for people who are really trying to make good decisions

and who have a little time, that's a problem. You get us into a lot of trouble. In our personal

lives, I find it coming up most often with respect to medical issues. People want to know

that a drug is safe, that a treatment is safe, that a surgery is safe, that a device is safe,

and they get certified that way. We talk about them that way, but of course there's

no such thing. Yeah, for an individual doctor or patient or for the food and drug administration,

there are gradations of risk. It's not as if there's an on-off switch. And so if you're

the sort of person who's willing to think hard about probabilities, which is when the

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