Comments on: Decision theory and the Underpants Bomber

By: Bloix

Bloix — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 03:16:57 +0000

The guy bought a one-way ticket, cash, and had no checked bags. What did he need to do to be searched, wear a sign saying I HAVE A BOMB IN MY PANTS? And ordinary people whose name is “Tom Smith” get searched if there’s a Tom Smith on the list, but a guy named Abdulmutallab, whose own father reported him to be a terrorist, is waived on through?

By: paul

paul — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:54:56 +0000

Not that it really matters when a discussion is this amorphous, but willingness-to-pay as a measure of cost to passengers almost certainly skews the cost figures down. if you went for ask rather than bid, you might get closer to the costs that are being imposed. Even the current security regime deters millions of trips a year, and an enhanced one (especially pseudo-random as the suggested one would be) would, I think, deter far more.

By: Rick B

Rick B — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 03:31:07 +0000

Someone on TV pointed out that airlines in Africa often prefer to be paid in cash because of the many scams they suffer from other forms of payment. I don’t personally know how accurate that information is, but if it is accurate that blows the idea that paying for the ticket in cash is a risk factor out of the water.

Since Nigeria has a reputation for scams and has more than one connection to the perpetrator, I suspect that the cash payment for the ticket is quite useless as an indicator of a possible terrorist.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:48:25 +0000

Mark is vastly overstating the costs of putting a Nigerian citizen (not resident in the US) on a list that prevents him from flying to the US. There is no right–recognized or otherwise–to travel by air to the US.

By: Mike S.

Mike S. — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 09:17:17 +0000

Ken Doran is correct that flying is statistically very safe. The problem is that in the wake of another successful terrorist attack a large percentage of the American populace would refuse to fly, statistics be damned. That the “social and economic impact” would be largely irrational is irrelevant. It would still happen.

By: Ken Doran

Ken Doran — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 01:15:03 +0000

I accepted the $10 million dollar figure for analysis. The $40 billion seems to me an order of magnitude mushier than the already-soft value of a life calculation; I will wait for your breakdown before trying to respond as to its accuracy. I would note, however, that a very great deal indeed would depend on the circumstances. An event in the heart of a major city — such as the first World Trade Center plane if it stood alone as a separate incident — will have much greater collateral consequences than a plane going down in the ocean — think Air India Flight 182 in 1985. Concern about this amorphous “social and economic impact” may cover some of the same territory that I would identify as the inherent vulnerability of soaring through the air in a tube. I continue to believe that dollars per life analysis is largely off the point here. The irony is that even taking very full account 9/11, Air India, and Lockerbie and for good measure hypothesizing that the shoe bomber and the undies bomber had succeeded, air travel is statistically very safe, and the risks that do exist are mostly not from terrorism.

By: Mark Kleiman

Mark Kleiman — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:11:23 +0000

Ken, this isn’t about “putting a dollar value on human life.” It’s about putting a value on avoiding small risks of death. The $10 million figure is only slightly on the high side of the standard range used in benefit-cost analysis. (Viscusi estimated $7 million back in 2005, and there’s been both inflation and real economic growth since then.) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=827205 International airline passengers are much wealthier than average, so they presumably put higher values on their own lives than average.

The estimate is based on studies of the compensating differentials for high-risk occupations. It’s only “several times higher” than the “lost-wages” analysis beloved of the tort defense bar.

As to the costs of a successful airline strike, I’m not inflating the value-of-avoided-death figure; the value of avoding those deaths, to the people suffering them, is independent of whether they die flying or getting hit by lightening. But the social and economic impact of a high-publicity terror incident would be profound; if you think the right answer is less than $40 billion, you can say why, but that additional value isn’t essential to the structure of my argument.

By: Ken Doran

Ken Doran — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:07:48 +0000

Putting a dollar value on human life is obviously problematical and devoid of a “correct” answer. Mark obviously has no objection to trying, since he builds such a value into his analysis. The figure chosen, $10 million dollars each, is several times higher than most analyses. (The additional 10-fold multiplier for terrorism deaths comes out of the wild blue yonder.) If we use the high value $10 million per life, the historical record suggests that the average “cost” per flight segment of the risk of being killed by terrorism ala 9/11 or Lockerbie is well under a dollar per person. It is several times less than the still-small risk of being killed in a crash caused by something like weather issues or mechanical failure. The bottom line is that we do not tie ourselves in elaborate and demeaning knots with airline security because it is cost-effective in terms of lives saved. We do it because pressurized tubes of people flying through the air at high speed radiate a peculiar vulnerability, no matter what the statistics say. Airliners make an obvious target for a suicide bomber seeking a highly dramatic exit, or for any evil doer of whatever motive. The obsession is inevitiable and understandable, and the issues are difficult, but dollars per life analysis is off the mark.

By: DCA

DCA — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:36:56 +0000

Good point–but implementing a “second screen” requires communicating information (of more complexity than “no-fly”) to the TSA screeners, who are already swamped because of the security theater of scanning everyone and all baggage. (It is not clear if the additional screenings that are already done are driven by anything other than a random-number system–not that this is necessarily a bad thing).

It might make more sense for the process at the terminal to consist of a step of checking names against a list, then putting 90% of the people into a line with no checking at all, 10% into one with
the current checks–and then the same division, so 1% get the most intensive look. And try to make the
sorting process better, rather than the screening one applied to everyone. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this kind of statistical approach would be deemed sufficient.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:28:41 +0000

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