Tuesday, July 31, 2012

women and children first?

"According to a recent study by two Swedish economists, that brand of gallantry is not only dead, it was buried at sea long ago.  Keen to test humanity's capacity for selflessness in times of scarcity and duress, the students of the "dismal science" reviewed survival data for some of history's worst shipwrecks.  What they found was that women and children were only half as likely as crew members and captains to survive maritime disasters.  Instead of "women and children first" and "the captain must go down with the ship," the rallying cry seemed to be "every man for himself," the authors wrote."