Dick Cheney was famous for his "One Percent Doctrine", described by Ron Suskind in his book of the same name:
If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.
And yet, curiously, that same attitude did not apply to the threat of global warming, which was known about as far back as the 1970s, and theorized in the late 1800s. While those outside the climate science community have been artfully confused by a denialist strategy, no one can credibly claim that experts regard the chance of global warming at less than 1%. Nor, indeed, has the chance been seen as that remote since at least the 1980s. So why no 1% doctrine there?
Setting aside the question of answers for the moment, the question itself is most illuminating. First of all, how come it has not been asked very often? Suskind's book was a NYT bestseller. The question--if not some variation--is a fairly obvious one. So why hasn't it been asked quite doggedly? Secondly, what does it mean to have risk formulated this way? How does it comport with professional risk analysis and risk management? How does it compare with traditional practices in the field of insurance? Or other fields where risks must be assessed and resonded to? Whatever the reasons involved in why this doctrine was formulated, just how different is it?
A rough answer to these questions is fairly straightforward: It's quite different. The normal way of calculating potential losses is to multiply the potential loss by the probabilty. A 1% probability of even a terrible loss is still enormously different from a 100% probability. What's more, treating it as a certainty would entail acting in a manner that ignores any costs involved in the potential over-reaction. We may not know what those costs might be. They could be quite high, or they could be relatively trvial. But if we do not even stop to consider them, then we are not even attempting to engage in a rational process. This can be especially disastrous if we actually increase the probabily of what we fear by assuming it to already be certain. There is also, of course, the chance that concentrating on one improbably threat may distract us from attended to other, more imminant and credible threats.
Thus, whatever the reasons for Cheney's approach embodied in the "one percent doctrine", it is perfectly clear that it is not a normal procedure for those accustomed to dealing with threats, it does not accurately assess the threat involved, nor does it consdier the existence of additional threats that it may actually enhance or even create where they do not presently exist.
With those problematic aspects of the "one percent doctrine" already established, we can now turn to the questions of "Why?" And here there is already a fairly rich literature.
To start with, Robert Altemeyer discovered that rightwing authoritarians were very prone to think that just about any threat they encountered was the worst thing imaginable. Or, as he put it in The Authoritarians:
You can appreciate their short- fall in critical thinking by how easily authoritarian followers get alarmed by things. When I asked a group of students if the most serious problem in our country today was the drug problem and the crime it causes, a solid majority of the high RWAs said yes.1 When I asked another group if the destruction of the family was our most serious problem, the great majority of authoritarians in that group said it was. When I asked a third group if our most serious problem was the loss of religion and commitment to God, a solid majority of those authoritarians said yes. And a solid majority of the high RWAs in a fourth group agreed the destruction of the environment was our biggest problem. We've apparently got a truck load of "biggest" problems.
It's much harder to catch low RWAs doing this sort of thing. When someone says one of their favorite issues is our biggest problem (e.g. the destruction of individual freedom, or poverty), they seem to ask themselves, "Is it?"--whereas
authoritarian followers usually respond, "It is!"
Rightwing authoritarianism isn't the only factor related to conservatism that contributes to this sort of thing. The meta-analsys "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition" cites at least two other factors with an obvious relationsip to a heightened sense of threat: death anxiety and "fear of threat and loss" as well as three others that show an adverse disposition toward ambiguity and novelty: dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity and a negation of openness to experience and uncertainty tolerance. The abstract of this study concludes:
The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.
In short, there are an over-abundance of attitudinal reasons why conservatives would tend to over-estimate the degree of threat posed by any particular subject, even, in some cases, a subject generally identified as a liberal concern. Of course, should authoritarian followers suppress their sense of threat, out of deference to authoritarian leaders (on the subject of global warming, say), then interesting dynamics such as displacement and projection might be expected, with the fear still present, but redirected. And, indeed, this has been frequently seen, with scientists themselves being identified as a source of threat.
In addiiton to attitudinal factors, Lakoff's cognitive model of liberalism and conservatism gives additional reasons for why conservatives should be much more indiscriminately fearful. The "Strict Father" model that Lakoff identifies with conservatism is premised on the conception of a dangerous world", which requires a vigilant and combative outlook, strictly following the rules in order to avoid getting into trouble. Paradoxically, Lakoff notes that the "Nurturant Parent" might actually be aware of a wider range of threats--such as pollution, defective products, etc.--that the Strict Father might tend to overlook. So it's not necessarily a matter of one parental model being more of less vigilant than the other. Rather, danger itself is more of the omnipresent background of the Strict Father outlook, even if the Nurturant Parent may have more accurate knowledge of a range of threats that don't normally even occur to the Stirct Father.
Bringing this all back down to earth, in terms of the example of global warming, there is already substantial evidence of the threat posed, in the form of heightened insurance costs, which have been monitored by reinsurance companies for some time now. That fact that such empirical evidence of risk--not from scientists, but from the business sector itself--has been not just ignored, but denied by conservatives speaks to the intensity and complexity of the dynamics involved. Global warming is a kind of threat that should not exist according to various forms of conservative ideology--not just libertarianism, but also religious ideologies that posit God's ominpotence and man's [sic] powerlessness. It also suggests kinds of solutions--collective action, government rules and regulations, restrictions of business "liberty," etc.--that conservatives also find objectionable.
The same applies as well to the financial and economic crises we are now living through. There is an historically irrefutable precedent for certain sorts of action--also supported by well-developed models--these include both fiscal and monetary policies that were previously regarded as uncontroversial in situations such as those we now find ourselves in--what Krugman aptly calls "Depression Economics". And yet there is a spreading tendency--even among professionals who would ordinarily know better--to argue against sound policies with clearly established and empirically gounded rationales, and instead to call for policies that show every indication of making matters worse.
While one explanation of this--which certainly contains some truth--focuses on naked and narrow self-interest--I do not believe that that is the whole story, particularly since the actions being advocated could severely damage the economic system as a whole, thus hurting those who have the most to lose if it would further fall apart. It's my belief that we should expect the same sorts of distorting factors to be at work in the field of economics that have thus far prevented a reality-based response to global warming--one that the Stern Review has clearly established would be much better for the global economy in the long run.
