Comment by schoen

A few months ago, I wrote a review of the book A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. The book describes the Free Town Project, a kind of offshoot of the Free State Project in New Hampshire, in which people moved to a particular town in order to try to reduce the role of local government in their lives. The book notes that the town then had significant difficulty coordinating on wildlife control issues, as there were lots of bears in the nearby woods and the residents had trouble agreeing on what to do to keep them away from people.

While the issues were somewhat complex and not solely the result of the Free Town Project, it seemed clear that the lack of governmental coordination and some residents' bear-attracting behaviors made the bears' presence a bigger problem than it had been before.

One thing I thought several times while reading the book was that the preparedness paradox was a big part of the challenge (although I didn't remember that it was called that!). Specifically, it seemed like quite a few of the people involved sincerely thought that wildlife management or wildlife control wasn't "a thing" because they had only ever lived in places where it was already being handled well. So they didn't perceive any need to continue actively addressing it in their new environment, because it seemed like such a hypothetical or fanciful risk.

Since then, I've thought that the question of understanding or evaluating what is a real risk that one needs to make a real effort to deal with gets extremely clouded by all of the things that people and institutions are already doing in the name of risk mitigation. We've seen this most dramatically with measles vaccines (where people felt like measles was an incredibly remote risk, because they had never seen it occur at all in their environments, because other people had successfully mitigated it by vaccination and hygiene programs in earlier generations!). But I imagine that this comes up over and over in modern life: how do people get a clear sense of what is dangerous (and how dangerous it is) when they already live in settings where whatever degree of danger exists is already being dealt with well, so most people rarely or never witness its consequences?