> A ”best effort” summary of this article: if thousands of people die in once place, it’s one of the great tragedies in American history. However if thousands of people die in thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact of life.
In economics, this is called catastrophe aversion: as a society, do we prefer accidental deaths to be "clumped together" or not (the total number of people killed being equal). Though the question is very important in regulating certain industries that can produce major accidents, we don't really know much about social preferences in this regard (the limited studies undertaken so far suggest that Americans and Europeans do not want regulators to adopt catastrophe-averse policies for safety risks). For an approachable introduction to this question, see [1].
In economics, this is called catastrophe aversion: as a society, do we prefer accidental deaths to be "clumped together" or not (the total number of people killed being equal). Though the question is very important in regulating certain industries that can produce major accidents, we don't really know much about social preferences in this regard (the limited studies undertaken so far suggest that Americans and Europeans do not want regulators to adopt catastrophe-averse policies for safety risks). For an approachable introduction to this question, see [1].
[1] https://www.foncsi.org/en/publications/collections/industria...