The catastrophe everyone expects any day now will not happen any day now; it will happen decades later, when everyone is worrying about something else.
John Derbyshire stated it, tongue in cheek, in a National Review Online post, 'Rumors of War', presenting it as one of the cornerstones of modern social psychology. His example was nuclear war: feared in his youth, then displaced by worries about global warming, peak oil and demographic collapse, though he suspected the first fear had been the right one.
In practice
- Warnings of a global pandemic were a staple of the early 2000s, faded from public attention, and were borne out in 2020.
- A family that spent a year bracing for a redundancy that never came is caught out by a burst pipe.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is the issue-attention cycle: public worry rises and fades whatever the underlying risk. Another is that widely feared dangers attract the precautions that delay them.
- In its favour
- Captures the long record of failed forecasts of imminent catastrophe, and the drift of public attention from one danger to the next.
- Against it
- Some feared catastrophes arrive roughly on schedule, and the law cannot say which. Where worry leads to prevention, as with the preparations for the year-2000 computer problem, the non-event may be the worry's success rather than its error.
- Standing
- Compare Downs's issue-attention cycle.
- Subject
- Risk & Reliability
- Essay
- How much caution, and the jokes about its limits