The third week in April, when Chinese restaurants all across America sat empty, was a potential career laboratory for the thoughtful financial advisor. For it offers us a classic case study in phenomena which are critical to the function of advice: mass hysteria, media fearmongering and the most self-destructive public innumeracy, to name three.

There were, on April 1 of this year, 6,283,881,502 people alive in the world, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census. (Your tax dollars at work.) Of these, some 4000 people, or about .0000006 of the world’s population, had been diagnosed — as of the weekend April 19-20 — with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an illness brought on by a previously unknown strain of coronavirus. Of those, about 240 people had died: 105 each (or 87% of the total) in mainland China and Hong Kong.

In the United States that weekend, the Centers for Disease Control listed 190 "suspected" SARS cases, of whom 38 (nearly all of whom had just passed through Toronto) were classified as "probable" victims. No one in the United States, then or since, had died of SARS.

As statistically meaningless (and as geographically localized) as SARS was that weekend, it was orders of magnitude worse than it ever need have become, because public health bureaucrats in communist China had simply lied about it. All governments lie; authoritarian governments just lie worse than others, in inverse relationship to their transparency. Forced to choose between serving its constituents and preserving its position (and, in this case, its "face"), an entrenched bureaucracy will always let the problem compound and the public be damned. Note Japan’s announcement, on May 18, that it was going to use public money to bail out yet another huge zombie bank, Resona. The only difference between Resona and SARS is that Japan can’t hide Resona; if it could, it surely would. But I digress.

Please take all the time you need to review the foregoing data, because now we’re going to have a quiz. And here it is:

The answer, dear reader, is 47%. Yes, 12% said they were "very" concerned, and 35% — more than one in three respondents — were "somewhat" concerned, about getting a disease which, statistically speaking, nobody had. (Thirty-eight "probable" cases? I have to believe that, over that weekend, more than 38 Americans choked to death on their food.)

How, you ask, is that possible? How would this statistically insignificant public health problem, hugely concentrated halfway around the world, strike fear in the hearts of nearly half of a sample of the U.S. population (AOL subscribers) that is presumably somewhat better educated/informed/heeled than the masses at large? Specifically, what tool for magnification would one have to employ, in order to blow the reality up into the perception?

The answer, quite obviously, is the mass media. Just look at whom you’re dealing with. Even more to the point, look at when.

From the beginning of January until March 17, there was one story, and one only, in the media: war in Iraq, would we or wouldn’t we, the folly of going it alone, the prospect of body bags stacked like cordwood as we attacked the madman on his home ground.

Then, two weeks into a four-week "war" — this takes us up to about April 1 — the media had yet another one story: quagmire, advance stalled, we’ve outrun our supply lines, Marines going hungry, Saddam’s escaped, arrogant blunders, yada yada.

Thus, by the second week in April, as the unalloyed triumph in Iraq became indisputable, the media was facing its worst nightmare scenario. Since it can only report one thing, and since that one thing can only be a real or imagined disaster, the media had no story! So, hey presto: SARS!! (Or, as Dr. David Baltimore, the Nobel laureate in medicine, called it in The Wall Street Journal, SAMS — severe acute media syndrome.)

There is, when you stop to think about it, a specific precedent for this, and it isn’t ancient history, either.

Some weeks after September 11, with no further acts of catastrophic terrorism to report, and the true greatness of the American people never more in evidence, the media had (for exactly the reasons detailed above) no story. Hey presto: ANTHRAX!! Or, as the media called it, "the anthrax crisis." For even if only five people died of anthrax, including a Connecticut woman in her 90s, Tom Brokaw and Tom Daschle were threatened — and that’s a media crisis.

(As a means to devaluing thought, the media devalues language, notably in the noun "crisis," and also in the adjective "tragic," as in the tragic death of someone who fell down a flight of stairs. Note to surviving English speakers: Macbeth is a tragedy. The impending insolvency of the Social Security system is a crisis. Anthrax was neither. SARS was neither.)

Of the wretched denouement to the SARS "story," little need be said. By May 18, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak largely contained. Scientists already had a pretty good handle on how the virus had mutated, and therefore how to attack it. (It took years to identify and isolate HIV, as Dr. Baltimore pointed out. We nailed SARS in a few weeks because — partly driven by the post-9/11 focus on bioterror — we now have whole libraries of viruses stored on computer chips, "letting researchers identify suspect strains in a matter of days.")

And, in a final irony, on April 22 English scientists announced that they’d found a mechanism that allows malaria to develop drug resistance. That’s "malaria," as in "a disease that kills over one million people every year." Although the New York Times managed to get a SARS-related color photograph on its front page just about every day that week, it had no room in the next day’s edition for even one word about the malaria breakthrough. Which is perfectly understandable: it wasn’t bad news.

Now what, you ask, does any of this have to do with our jobs as financial advisors? Only everything, I reply:

The SARS hysteria reminds us that a huge part of our value to real clients is, finally, as an oasis of history and reason, in the middle of a merciless, arid desert of media fearmongering. You don’t get paid to be right. You get paid to be unafraid.

Now, get back out there and earn your pay. The people need you.