In today’s New York Times Magazine, two smart writers, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, make a really stupid mistake when they talk about nuclear power. The piece is called “the Jane Fonda Effect,” and it argues that the reason the United States doesn’t have more “clean and cheap nuclear energy” is that the 1979 movie “The China Syndrome” , combined with the accident at Three Mile Island, , irrationally scared the public away from this otherwise wonderful source of energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming.
“The big news is that nuclear power may be making a comeback in the United States,” the authors, who write the popular column “Freakonomics,” note. “Has fear of a meltdown subsided, or has it merely been replaced by the fear of global warming?”
To find that answer, they cite the work of Frank Knight, a legendary U.S. economist who first defined the different in the behavior of people faced with risk (which is quantifiable) and uncertainty, which is, well, uncertain. Here’s the drill: You have two boxes filled with red balls and white balls. Box one has exactly half of each; box two has an unknown mix. You want to draw a red ball; which box do you pick?