July/August issue: The perception of risk

Risks great and small have been a hazard of everyday life since time began, but modern technology has helped to multiply them. So how do we perceive risk? Even more important, how do we assess and try to forecast it?

• The crippling effects of fear
  Are we too easily frightened, too ready to see potential discouraging downside events, too anxious about the future to grasp the opportunities that lie ahead?
• Quantity versus quality
  Specialists and non-specialists tend to assess hazards of modern life differently. It's not so much a conflict of answers, but of questions asked in the first place.
• Safer skies and riskier roads
  Imagine the outcry if 90,000 people every year died in air crashes. That's how many are killed annually on the roads of Europe and the US.
• Living with an annual disaster
  More than 68 million people now have their homes in hurricane-vulnerable coastal areas of the US, according to the Insurance Information Institute. And the population in these areas is expected to increase by another 1.1 million by 2008.
• Modeling catastrophes
  Every time the earth shakes or a storm lashes the countryside, we are reminded that natural forces are beyond human control. And their cost could increase hugely.