America's Most Successful Terrorist?

Richard Reid paid one life sentence to destroy billions of minutes of time

Three months after 9/11, “Shoe Bomber” Richard Reid tried to blow up an airplane with his footware. Soon afterwards, TSA started “recommending” shoe removal during screenings, though as far as I recall the “recommendation” was universally mandatory from the get-go. Since 2006, shoe removal has been required both de jure and de facto. Now, without a government apology — or even an official explanation — TSA is ending this innumerate security policy.

What’s so innumerate about it? Let’s assume that the shoe requirement costs one minute of time per passenger. That’s actually conservative, because you have to count not only the time required to remove your own shoes, but also:

• all the delays forgetful people impose on everyone behind them in line

• all the delays TSA imposes on everyone when they enforce the rule on the forgetful. (How many times have you seen a person get up to the scanner, then get turned around to put their shoes on the belt?)

The average number of air travelers in the US over this period is about 700M per year, implying the destruction of roughly 15 billion minutes of time in the U.S. alone. That’s almost 30,000 years of life. If you figure the average American has about 30 more years to live, that’s 1000 lives destroyed. The cost? One lifetime in prison for Richard Reid.

1000:1. That dwarfs the immediate kill ratio of the 9/11 bombers, which was about 160:1. Even if you add on all 7,000 Americans killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 19 hijackers’ kill ratios only hit 520:1. Reid does even better if you count all of the wasted time of Western travelers around the world; while the U.S. “shoes-off policy” was unusually strict, lots of countries have had similar policies at some point.

But perhaps the policy was worth it? Highly unlikely. Cost-benefit evaluations of the totality of TSA regulations are generally highly negative, so it would be amazing if this comprehensive response to a one-time threat were a good idea. Indeed, Reid’s kill ratio would have been lower if he’d brought down his whole plane and the government had done nothing.

You could reply? “Do nothing?! The government can’t do nothing!” But that’s false. Like everyone else, the demagogues who rule us are fully capable of doing nothing. They just value their own power more than welfare of the people they rule — and they know that you win elections not by crunching numbers, but by the power of Social Desirability Bias.

Still, I’m delighted that Reid’s reign of terror is finally over. He destroyed thousands of years of life every year for decades, but at least he won’t destroy thousands of years of life every year forever. Happy travels, my friends.

The Shoe Bomber’s shoes.