What will kill you: A bathtub, dog, or terrorist?

"Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

It is a common phrase used by supporters of the War in Iraq to justify what is occuring in the Middle East. The theory goes, that if we (the United States) spend billions of dollar, sacrifice thousands of U.S. soldiers lives, and countless Iraqi lives that the citizens of this country will be safer from terrorists.

So, what are the odds that you, Joe Average Citizen, will die in a terrorist attack in your lifetime? And what are you willing to spend to increase those odds?

Michael Kinsely, of Time Magazine, writes the following:

The actual risk of being a terror victim is not merely small--it is unknown and unknowable. Economists make a distinction between "risk" and "uncertainty." Risk refers to hard mathematical odds. Uncertainty refers to situations in which the odds are anybody's guess.

Fair enough. Predicting something that is inherently unpredictable is obviously not an exact science. If the odds of being the victim of a terrorist attack are so astronomical that they can be classified as 'unknown and unknowabale,' one has to wonder what measuable benefit is obtained by invading and occupying Iraq is we are truly there to fight terrorism.

If it is impossible to derive odds of being a terrorist attack victim in any part of the United States at any given moment, perhaps if we begin to put parameters around it, we can begin to calculate possible odds.

Michale L. Rothschild, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin's business school:

"There are more than 40,000 malls in this country, and each is open about 75 hours per week. If a person shopped for two hours each week and terrorists were able to destroy one mall per week, the odds of being at the wrong place at the wrong time would be approximately 1.5 million to 1."

That sounds scary. Imagine if a mall every week was blown up. Your odds of dying (assuming everyone in the mall perishes) would be 1 in 1,500,000. Of course, you would have to go to the mall every week for those odds. And we would have to assume that terrorists would be successful in blowing up a mall every week like clockwork without getting caught. Oh, and we would assume that people would keep going to malls after there is a consistent pattern of malls blowing up.

Well, maybe terrorists would need more time for planning in order to evade capture. Maybe they would only try to blow up one mall per month:

"If terrorists destroyed one mall each month, the odds would climb to one in 6 million. This assumes the total destruction of the entire mall; if that unlikely event didn't occur, the odds would become even more favorable."

Still sounds scary: 1 in 6,000,000. Sure seems like invading a country halfway across the world, spending $338.9 billion dollars, sacrificing 2816 dead and 21,077 wounded American soldiers as well as between 45,000 to 50,000 reported Iraqi casulties is worth trying to make it a little safer for you to go to the mall.

Until you consider the odds of other ways you could perish:

Struck by lightning: 1 in 576,000

Drowning in a bathtub: 1 in 685,000

Being killed by a dog: 1 in 700,000

Freezing to death: 1 in 3 million

Perhaps once the Bush administration is done with ridding the world of the "unknown and unknowable" risk of terrorist attacks, they can turn their attention to some of the other more common risks the average citizen must deal with. Maybe all bathtubs, dogs, and big freezers should be collected and destroyed. They pose a larger risk to your livlihood than a terrorist does. How much are you willing to spend in dollars and lives to eliminate those threats?

Of course, there is at least one thing that poses even less of a threat than being a terrorist attack victim:

Meteor striking your house: 1 in 182,138,880,000,000

Wonder what Bush would be willing to sacrifice to increase those odds...