AEI is rereleasing some of its most prescient and groundbreaking works from its earliest thinkers and innovators. These books, part of a series called AEI Classics, are available for download as Adobe Acrobat PDFs.
This book brings together a collection of Roger Bate's articles, which have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Economic Affairs, and the Sunday Times during the past five years. His writing focuses on five key themes--usually unmentioned in other articles about risk:
Hazards are as likely to come from natural as from man-made substances.
The linear no-threshold hypothesis is rubbish (i.e. the dose makes the poison)
An entire industry has developed to scare us into stopping certain activities, or making us feel guilty for continuing them, or lobbying to have them banned by government.
The public are quite capable of making decisions that involve complex trade-offs if only we would let them; indeed, not letting them causes enormous problems as government bodies do not have the dispersed knowledge to do this, and are subject to interest group pressure.
There are innumerable benefits, as well as costs, from risk taking.
In Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade, AEI resident fellow Roger Bate analyzes the burgeoning international trade in counterfeit drugs and recommends steps that governments and law enforcement agencies could take to stop it.
The promise of "healthy aging" offers significant opportunities for economic growth and development for Europe in the decades ahead--if governments and citizens are willing to grasp them.
