If you want to see risk at work, watch a queue form where there is no reason for one. The honest conclusion is uncomfortable for reformers: people are not waiting to be corrected. Ask most people why they did what they did and they will give you a reason; ask them again a week later and the reason will have quietly changed. Every one of us runs the same shortcut, and every one of us believes we are the exception.
The ordinary case
The point is not that people are foolish. The point is that risk is expensive, and we economise on it like everything else. Economists have spent decades modelling risk as a quantity. It behaves more like a weather system. The textbook treats risk as a preference to be revealed. In practice it is a story we tell ourselves after the fact. The remedy is rarely exhortation. It is a change to the situation so that the easier choice is also the better one.
