The Arithmetic of Life and Death (5 page)

Although the health of the economy should be important to you, it is not a responsibility that you should take personally. Instead, you should endeavor to be part of the plurality of consumers who buy the best products and, therefore, force inferior manufacturers to improve their offerings in order to survive.

Joe Bob, however, was both poorly informed and unfortunate to get an experienced salesperson. As a result, he fell to Icon Association (endorsement = superiority), Emotional Appeal (expensive stereo = coolness), and Free Goodies (free = good). He wasn’t alone. These days, almost all markets are besieged by large quantities of suppliers, which means that lots of buyers must be making inferior decisions.

Economists have a lot of politically correct labels for this condition, such as buy side suboptimization, market inefficiency, and satisficing, just to name a few. They all converge on the same arithmetic certainty: In diverse markets, which
is practically all there are in the industrialized world, the majority of suppliers benefit from a lousy decision. Therefore, the weight of advertising and sales is bound to promote stupidity.

If you are uninformed, like Joe Bob was, then you are vulnerable to making a wrong decision, like Joe Bob did. To a large extent, the odds will be against you because the majority of manufacturers will benefit from your error, so they will attempt to induce it via known advertising and sales techniques. Therefore, once you become a consumer, it is your responsibility, and solely your responsibility, to ensure that you are well enough informed to make a sound buying decision.

R
eginald DeNiall, Billy Ray’s father and a Washington (the state) representative to the United States Congress, is both a talented politician and a student of the electoral college. He knows that every piece of proposed legislation possesses the potential for political suicide. So Reginald, who is not a trained statistician but who is thought by some to covet a seat in the Senate, decided in his first year in office that he would never support any bill unless he was at least 75 percent certain that his vote would reflect the wishes and desires of his core constituency—the top ten contributors to his election campaign.

Convinced that he had found a way to minimize any risk of future campaign funding deprivation, Reginald began to vote when 75 percent confident, or to abstain when less so,
on each new legislative proposal. Unfortunately, even at 75 percent assurance per bill, Reginald’s probability of avoiding a mistake for just three consecutive votes was .75 times .75 times .75, which was less than 43 percent. And his chances of making as many as five correct decisions in a row, even though each individual vote was heavily weighted in his favor, were less than one in four (about 23.7 percent).

True to form, Reginald soon made a mistake that inflamed the antipathies of his benefactors. Being nothing if not career minded, Reginald instantly concluded that he had to revise his strategy. Since no elected official can abstain on all but five bills over two years and still get reelected, except in Louisiana, a draconian reduction in voting activity did not appear to be a viable long-term solution. So Reginald chose another alternative. He subscribed to every on-line library and polling service, he tripled his research staff, and he demanded from all of his advisors and consultants a 90 percent likelihood of voting correctness.

If his recently enlarged staff are on their toes, then Congressman DeNiall’s current chances of error on any individual vote are now very small—only one in ten. Once again, though, the long run is against him. By Reginald’s seventh ballot, the odds favor at least one mistake, and the probability that he will make one or more mistakes in the next twenty-five votes is almost 93 percent.

History suggests, rather strongly, that elected officials may make a few more mistakes than one in seven. And, of course, politics has never had much to do with real life. Medicine, however, does have to do with real life, and doctors, in particular, are plagued by the inevitability of
error and its consequences. The number of things that can go wrong with a human being is, after all, infinitely large. But the time available to determine the cause of a life-threatening illness or injury is never infinite, meaning that, in some cases, certain death will precede certainty of diagnosis.

In life-threatening situations such as these, we don’t want to require doctors to wait until they are 100 percent sure of the cause. The patient will die first. So we want to empower doctors to make an enlightened guess whenever necessary. In return, however, we must live with the inevitability of error, as they must, even though the consequences may be dire.

In fact, we all must make choices, so we all must make mistakes. (Decision avoidance theorists may wish to read the afterword, “Why More Things Go Wrong” before arguing the point.) That is because there are times when all of us will be forced to make decisions prior to knowing all of the facts, all of the consequences, or all of the alternatives. Even if we could be as much as 95 percent certain of every decision we make, we would still be likely to make at least one mistake by only the fourteenth decision. At only five decisions per day, 95 percent probability of making the right decision every time would still result in nearly two mistakes per week, more than ninety mistakes per year, and about 7,000 mistakes in an average lifetime.

But nobody has the luxury of being 95 percent certain with regularity, and most folks have to make more than five decisions per day. So mistakes are a fact of life. More important, some mistakes are living evidence of the courage to make tough decisions. That means that we must not
only extend the Gift of Fallibiity to ourselves, we must also learn to graciously accept the well-intended mistakes of parents and role models, spouses, and children, friends and family, including in-laws, subordinates and peers, and bosses (yes, even bosses). The Gift of Fallibility need never extend, however, to the habitual repetition of dangerous error.

M
ore than 400,000 Americans die from cigarette consumption every year. That’s the city of Austin, Texas, up in smoke, each and every twelve months. But one in five American adults still smokes, even in Austin, and the habit is on the rise among teenagers.

Most get hooked up with cigarettes in their youth. It’s hip, it’s a duty-free method of adult behavior simulation, and it’s cheap. Bought in bulk, cigarettes still cost only fifteen cents or so, or about three cents a minute.

But most smokers get hooked for the long haul. That’s because smokers discover, even after they become genuine adults, that it is very difficult to quit (more than three out of four fail). So the costs tend to accumulate.

Billy Ray DeNiall, Reginald’s youngest son, started smoking earlier this year at the advanced age of sixteen.
Desperate to simulate the fullness of adulthood, he already smokes a pack and a half a day. If his habit stays the same, he will spend more than $80,000 on cigarettes by the age of sixty-six—at today’s prices. But if inflation averages 5 percent over the next fifty years, then the long-term cost of Billy Ray’s habit will exceed $340,000.

In order to spend $340,000 on cigarettes, Billy Ray will probably have to earn around $490,000 (assuming a marginal income tax rate of 30 percent, the other $150,000 or so will go to various and sundry governments in the form of income taxes). So unless he can quit, Billy Ray’s pack-and-a-half habit is likely to cost him an average of $9,800 per year, which is more than $25 per day, over the long haul.

A Corvette is likely to be much cheaper—and a lot less dangerous. The rule of thumb is that Billy Ray’s life will be shortened about one minute for every minute he smokes, or about an hour and a half per pack. So if he sticks to his habit of a pack and a half a day for the full fifty years, then his death will be hastened by four to five years. That may not seem like a lot to a sixteen-year-old, but it will loom rather larger at the age of sixty-six. In the meantime, Billy Ray will be sick more often, he will have less strength and stamina, and, up close and personal, he will smell like a wet yak.

Smoking is the archetypal drug habit. It is extraordinary in the beginning, then ordinary, then necessary, then addictive. Over the long run, it is destructive to life. Each and every cigarette is a promissory note—a habit-forming commitment to pay as much as one-third of a million dollars to the tobacco farmers, the cigarette manufacturers, the cardiovascular surgeons, and the morticians who trade in its wake.

Billy Ray is not alone in his vigorous support of this important industry. One in five Americans still smokes. More than 400,000 die every year from complications caused by the habit. If there are 1,000 people in your circle of friends and acquaintances, then about 160 of them will die before their time from cigarettes.
*
That is 160 funerals that you should plan to attend, unless you also smoke, in which case you should be planning your own.

F
or most popular offenses, the odds are against getting caught. That’s why they’re popular. But offenders still manage to get caught with remarkable consistency. If it weren’t for teenagers, this might be a mystery.