Trust and Spin

Thirty years ago, in 1992, Economic professors Robert Tollison and Richard Wagner wrote The Economics of Smoking. They argued that because “people” thought that smoking was more dangerous than it actually was, it meant that there was no market (the system of private supply and demand) failure. Thus, people didn’t need to be warned about cigarettes or to have them regulated. They were right about the perception but maybe the policy prescription is wrong.

People, meaning all people, don’t die from cigarettes. In fact, one of three smokers don’t die from smoking. The public health question isn’t what most people believe—it is what the individuals, i.e., 11.5% of Americans who smoke them believe—that matters. From a smoker’s perspective, 2 out of 3 dying is an extremely high risk. In the regulatory world, for example, we talk about risks of 1 in a million or 1 in 10 million.

Tollison and Wagner didn’t spin the information they produced, but they did zero in on belief, which is what governs behavior. Here are some of the questions about beliefs that appear to have answers routinely spun:

• Are pesticide residues dangerous? 

• Is PFAS (chemicals used to make products that resist heat, oil, stains, grease, and water) going to sicken or kill large numbers of people? 

• Were Donald Trump’s policies bad?

• Was the 2020 election really rigged? 

• Is global warming really causing more intense hurricanes?     

• Are current carbon policies going to have much of an effect on global temperatures? 

The spin and lies come from the politicians, media, activists and federal agencies. I suspect that many people are desperately looking for truth in these areas. Perhaps that’s why, in 2023, 49% of all adults call themselves “Independent,” and only 25% are attached to Democrats and 25% to Republicans. It may also explain why less than half of Americans trust politicians.

According to a U.S. News & World Report survey, people have trust in local TV news (80%), national network news (72%) and their local newspaper (72%) but they distrust cable news considerably. The vast majority don’t trust Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram. 

Nearly half of Americans don’t trust CDC and FDA but most (64%) trust their doctor.

The survey didn’t mention two other sources, neither of whom are very trustworthy. Many people get their information from people close to them, i.e., friends and relatives. Often, friends and relatives, unless they are specialists in the area, report something they have read or heard, or worse, personal anecdotes. Anecdotes are spin and are wildly misleading, e.g., “Last year I drove near a nuclear power plant and now I have cancer.”

The other source not mentioned in the survey is activist nonprofits. Some of the health-oriented organizations specialize in scaring people. They have a different problem than reporting anecdotes; they report hazards, not risks.  Anything can be a hazard. A light pole can be a hazard if you run your car into it at 80 miles an hour. Pesticides would be a hazard if you drank them.  Nevertheless, some activist organizations warn you about pesticides. As I wrote about in Fixing Food, the Department of Agriculture does annual surveys of pesticide residues and routinely finds that the tiny residue amounts are too small to have any appreciable risk. Warnings about hazards are spin.

Media is also in the business of scaring you about hazards. In fact, media sources compete to scare you first. That means they will often base their scary story on a single study. That is not a scientific finding. Science begins with a hypothesis (e.g., this product is a human risk) and then needs multiple studies to try and dispute that hypothesis. As the studies progress, and each successive study fails to refute the hypothesis, there is a greater likelihood that the hypothesis is true.  In general, the media doesn’t do summaries of multiple studies, or wait for the studies that test hypotheses. Reporting out of context, i.e., failure to mention insufficient research to prove a hypothesis, is a type of spin. 

Tollison and Wagner did an excellent study pointing out that people’s beliefs are not consistent with actual risk. That’s common. In fact, that’s often the case and it is true that people overestimate the risk of cigarettes and vastly overestimate the risk of cigars and e cigarettes. In the latter two cases, it’s hazard spin from FDA. There is still a market for truth.