The farmer in the of Tanzania and the farmer in the southern Australian plains contemplating developing drought face similar decisions as to whether to the hazard area and what the will do in the event of continuing shortage. Like other individua s who knowingly expose themselves to a
natural hazard, they make some kind of appraisal of the prospect
that drought will continue. They canvass a number of the possible
actions to be taken in dealing with the threatening environment.
Each thinks about the consequences to himself and his family of
taking those actions. Finally, they choose in one way or another
what, if anything, they will do.
One farmer may plant a "catch" crop to try again for at least a modicum yield. The other may quietly sit it out. As outlined in Chapter 2, they can do many things, and they can decide to do none. It is this process of individual choice that is at the base of much of the action of people in dealing with extreme natural events. The invasion of Char Jabbar by peasants is triggered by
government's decision to protect the coast, but the actual move-
ment is an aggregation of individual decisions. The decision of the Wilkes-Barre ätizens to remain in their homes after the flood re-ceded is reflected in a public program, but it is at root a summation
of family actions.
The land behind Baghdad, like the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, gives mute testimony of failure to survive in places of hazard. The density
of settlement amid poverty in northeast Brazil, as in the Ganges-
Brahmaputra delta, testifies to survival without prosperity. With regard to the less chronic or less cataclysmic events, why is it that people appear at times to seek less than the best for them-
selves, to take unnecessary risks, to be ignorant of serious consequences, or to seem remarkably foolish in a hindsight view of their
personal history?
If it Were known precisely why people select some information and ignore other information, much social behavior could be explained. For example, risk-taking by residents on the seismically active San Andreas fault zone in Califonia is often dismissed with facile generalizations. Residents of the ault zone are branded sim-ply as greedy or stupid or shortsighted. Their actions are then explained or forecast in similarly simplistic terms. These appraisals come easy, are applied readily to public solutions, and are usually misleading. They rarely have predictive power; more complicated answers must be sought.
For an understanding of how choices are made, it would be helpful to have a detailed theory of individual decision processes.
But, as indicated in Chapter 2, no satisfactory model is yet available
to illuminate the behavior of the Bengal fisherman or of a Tanzanian or Australian farmer. Lacking that, we can develop a rough model of bounded rationality to review what is known and to outline relations that SHII are speculative.