Selfie Deaths Are Like Market Crashes
Investors should worry much more about excessive fees, which are the financial equivalent of high cholesterol – something that might kill you.
Just be careful.
Photographer: Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty ImagesToday’s missive covers three of our favorite subjects: innumeracy, psychology and investing. It comes to us courtesy of an article in Outside magazine discussing “the epidemic behind selfie deaths: 259 people died between 2011 and 2017.” The article goes on to document some of the risky and foolish things people did while taking a selfie before they were killed, usually by falling from someplace very high.
The article brought to mind shark attacks, which we fear inordinately even though they so rare that they amount to little more than statistical rounding errors. Meanwhile, we pay almost no attention to mundane but much more lethal threats, such as heart disease and cancer, which claim many, many more lives than sharks, selfies, lightning strikes, terrorists or any of the other freakish events that kill people. Not that you could tell this based on news report or the postings on social media, but the grim reality is that you are something like 35,000 times more likely to meet your maker due to the former than one of the latter.