I am in Chennai for my Value Investing Workshop that happened yesterday.
After my session, I went to meet a friend in the evening. His residential society had organized a bicycle race for kids. I saw more than 50 kids out there jostling for space meant for not more than 10 cyclists. Worse, most of them were without a helmet.
Now, letting your child cycle without a helmet may be ten times riskier than feeding him a course of dangerous non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. And a thousand times riskier than flying in an airplane.
Moving in the front seat of a car without a seatbelt (which most people, especially teens, do when the policeman is not watching) is hundred times riskier than many common and ‘scary’ diseases in India, like swine flu.
Yet we obsess about the low probability events and take big chances with the high probability ones. Why?