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Comment by hotpockets | Hacker News Reader

Its hard to imagine the negative effects of terrorism are greater than those of disease. After all, many more people die of disease than die of terrorism. Its pretty easy for people to move away from terror zones. I could just move to the country if I was afraid of terrorism. When people spread out, terrorism becomes more difficult. Except very few people do this.

On the other hand, if there was a magical place where all diseases would be cured, I imagine there would be a mad scramble to get in.

I also made a crude estimate for economic impact of disease in another comment of ~$250 trillion per year.

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I said the negative effects of a death due to crime or terrorism is greater than that of a death due to disease.

Look at e.g. Chicago. 500 or so murders a year, dwarfed by the number of deaths from heart disease, etc, and people freak out. But that reaction has an economic cost--it's harder to get middle class people to move into and stay in the city when they fear crime.

Maybe people shouldn't be so unnerved by crime and terrorism, but they are. 1,000 traffic deaths a year in Illinois does absolutely nothing to curb car culture. 1,000 terrorism deaths a year in Illinois would gut the economy of the state as people fled to saver environs.

A. I don't understand the comparison. Crime is different than terror. For example some of the highest value terror targets are where the highest density of people are. Obviously people aren't moving away from city centers. Crime on the other hand is associated with poverty and is not committed by terrorists. People who are capable move away, sometimes just a few miles away.

B. I don't undestand the following types of argument:

1. people are ignorant of something and have irrational fears about it.

2. Lets spend a bunch of money so they feel better.

What ever happened to education?

You're overanalyzing my post. My point is simply that you can't count up number of deaths to compare two problems. One murder puts a far bigger strain on the social fabric than one old person dying of heart disease. The fact that people in a city of almost 3 million people freak out over ~500 murders, compared to probably thousands dying of heart disease, a year is evidence of that fact.

Perhaps, but how do you know it puts a far bigger strain? Certainly the family of the victim freaks out, but the communities stress response is unknown to me. A sudden onset illness to a close family member is also calamitous.

I'm also not saying its as easy as the numbers I threw together. Its just a ballpark estimate, until someone comes along and gives a better estimate.

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