Martyn Lewis, the TV newscaster, was derided, nay ridiculed, in 1993 for advocating that the balance between good and bad news should be tipped much more towards the former. “It’s not what the public wants,” was the widespread defensive reaction from his colleagues. And media presenters have carried on reporting and pushing under our noses (and eyes and ears) items calculated to arouse fear. Much of their material includes ‘supporting’ (and often misleading) figures to lend strength to what are often assertions. “Men mistook measurement for understanding.” is a perceptive aphorism in Robert Harris’s Pompeii. Panicology has been widely reviewed but seems to have had scant impact on fellow journalists. The same or similar scare items are still encountered daily, a practice which will probably remain with us unchangingly. “Anxiety is everywhere a condition of modern life,” we are told. Probably 'twas ever thus but global communication enables this dictum to be more easily observed and calibrated. 

Introductory courses in economics soon introduce Malthus. He was one of the early doomsters, whose dire warnings on population (1798) still remain unproven. Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) is cited as a forerunner discussant of popular anxieties. Panicology is a latter-day result of trawling through a number of current media ‘concerns’, which play on people’s fears. The book groups them into headings and comments on their justification and possible amelioration. 

To interpret which topics are economic and which are social is not always easily done, but there are more of the latter than the former in this compendium. The authors structure their material into 10 chapters and some 40 sections, and round off each with their subjective ratings, scaled between 1 (low) and 5 (high), on panic, risk and personal empowerment (ie can one do anything to alleviate one’s fears?). Fears about ‘terror’, crime, immigration, debt and health are given the highest ‘panic’ ratings. 

The Industrial Revolution brought us the internal combustion engine and its subsequent offspring has led us to the unfortunate and ever-‘panicological’ dependency on oil. Then whole industries have appeared and later disappeared, either nationally or globally, as technology has  ‘progressed’. Many of the topics discussed in this book can be linked either directly or indirectly to such developments. 

Simon Briscoe will be well-known to many of you – he’s an SBE member, Statistics Editor of the FT, author of Britain in Numbers (2005), Interpreting the Economy (2000) and Measuring the Economy (1995), co-authored with Christopher Johnson. Now he and Hugh Aldersey-Williams have compiled this entertaining, sometimes witty, descriptive, readable but not very analytical well digested overview of selected topics looking at figures from a different viewpoint. Though much still remains ‘dismal’, statistics and economics can be ‘fun’, as these authors, as well as Tim Harford, the FT’s Undercover Economist, and Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, in their The Tiger That Isn’t, have recently shown. 

Panicology appears to be aimed at the general reader, who is generally described as innumerate yet is assumed to understand ratings (and the results of polls). Source references (headed Notes), mostly publications, are collected at the back but there is no index. 

“What are you afraid of?” is a question on the dust-jacket. Get a grip on yourselves; don’t worry, some of your worst fears may never materialise. I absorbed this Weltanschaung early in life. It’s never too late to adopt such a perspective. It contributes to a better ‘happiness’ measure, a current focus for some economists.

Ulric Spencer