Everyday hazards such as inhaling polluted city air or other people's cigarette smoke are potentially worse for your health than being exposed to the radioactive fallout of an atomic bomb, according to the research mentioned in the article.
A study of radiation exposure caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 and the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has suggested that they have posed similar or lower health risks to survivors than the more prevalent problems of air pollution, smoking and obesity.
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this is very interesting and comes back to the issue that risk perception seems to be bound up in things like saliency and perceptions on injustice etc., Glaeser and others have asked though how could irrational risk calibration (e.g. underweighting the risks of obesity) persist. There are ways of reconciling this with rational behaviour. For example, one could view the production of risk perception toward nuclear as the production of a public good that minimises the proliferation. Indeed, if you begin to look at risk perception as a production model, lots of interesting things emerge. The consumers of this information must also have something to gain from holding the false beliefs. With obesity, it might simply be the purhcase of short-term belief consistency! As always, none of these models should be taken literally but they do lead to some interesting and counterintuitive explanations. See Glaeser's Harvard homepage for some good ones.
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