Has anyone tried to quantify the economic cost of recent anti-terrorism measures, not just the monetary costs, but the inefficiencies? What is the implied cost of saving a human life from terrorism? There were some letters recently in the NYT from frequent business travelers complaining about the new restrictions. One wrote along the lines of, I travel a jillion miles a year. To make tight connections, etc. I have figured out how to pack all my stuff into a carry-on, this includes grooming stuff so I can be ready for my business meeting. If I have to check this it will really screw me up.
Ordinarily, aren't our conservative economist friends in love with this sort of thing? Eg in the Armchair Economist. Ha ha ha, silly liberals, you want to have seat belt laws. But these are really inefficient. Ha ha ha, silly liberals, lovers of the nanny state, you want to have zero risk. Where are our conservative economist friends now?
On 8/17/06, Michael Perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Mueller, John. 2004. "A False Sense of Insecurity?" Regulation (Fall): pp. 42-46. > John Mueller holds the humorously named Woody Hayes Chair of National Security > Studies at the Mershon Center at Ohio State University. For those who don't know > football history, Google will tell you about the rise and fall of Woody Hayes. > 42: "Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all > forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of > those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the > September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by > international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department > began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the > same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to > peanuts." > 43: He refers to "hyperbolic overreaction." > 44: " University of Michigan transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael > Flannagan, in an article last year in American Scientist, wrote that they determined > there would have to be one > set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, > they calculate that an American.s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline > flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into > account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America.s safest roads -- > rural interstate highways -- one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles."
-- Robert Naiman Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org
