Posted by Todd Zywicki:
Anne Applebaum on Cost-Benefit Analysis and Airport Security:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_06_12-2005_06_18.shtml#1118842605
Having spent yesterday engaged in an agonzing day of a round-trip
flight to New York and back, Anne Applebaum's column today calling for
the most minimal assessment of cost-benefit analysis in airport
security seems right on target. From [1]Airport Security's Grand
Illusion:
If you happen to be reading this while standing in one of those
disturbingly slow, zigzag lines at airport security -- looking
repeatedly at your watch, wondering if this time you really will
miss the plane -- here's something to make you feel worse: Almost
none of the agony you are experiencing is making you safer, at
least not to any statistically significant or economically rational
degree. Certainly any logical analysis of the money that has been
spent on the airport security system since Sept. 11, 2001, and the
security that the system has created, must lead to that conclusion.
She continues:
Yet this mass ceremonial sacrifice of toenail clippers on the altar
of security comes at an extraordinarily high price. The annual
budget of the federal Transportation Security Administration hovers
around $5.5 billion -- just about the same price as the entire FBI
-- a figure that doesn't include the cost of wasted time. De Rugy
reckons that if 624 million passengers each spend two hours every
year waiting in line, the annual loss to the economy comes to $32
billion. There has also been a price to pay in waste, since when
that much money is rubbed into a problem with that kind of speed --
remember, the TSA had only 13 employees in January 2002 -- a lot of
it gets misspent. In the case of the TSA, that waste includes
$350,000 for a gym, $500,000 for artwork and silk plants at the
agency's new operations center, and $461,000 for its first-birthday
party. More to the point, the agency has spent millions, even
billions, on technology that is inappropriate or outdated.
In fact, better security didn't have to cost that much. Probably
the most significant measure taken in the past four years was one
funded not by the government but by the airline industry, which put
bulletproof doors on its cockpits at the relatively low price of
$300 million to $500 million over 10 years. In extremely blunt
terms, that means that while it may still be possible to blow up a
plane (and murder 150 people), it is now virtually impossible to
drive a plane into an office building (and murder thousands). By
even the crudest cost-benefit risk analysis, bulletproof cockpit
doors, which nobody notices, have the potential to save far more
lives, at a far lower cost per life, than the screeners who open
your child's backpack and your grandmother's purse while you stand
around in your socks waiting for them to finish.
References
1.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/14/AR2005061401346.html
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[email protected]
http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
