Kind of an obvious point, but airport screening procedures don't "cost" or "destroy" any portion of your life. You just spend that time standing in an airport line instead of doing something else.
It would probably make more sense to use willingness to pay.
This is just common English. When falsely convicted criminals are released after being held in prison, it's common for them to say that the state cost them X years of their life. It would be completely insane to say that, "no, actually, the state didn't cost them any years of their life because they were living their life in prison."
I don't think that would be particularly "insane". And in particular, if one wanted to estimate the welfare cost of false imprisonment, calculating as though it simply wipes the years in question off your life would lead to an overestimate.
That “doing something else” would be living your life, which for most people when given a choice doesn’t consist of standing in line and taking one’s shoes off and on.
As I said, when given a choice it’s not the activity people would choose to do with their time. Anything that happens while you’re alive is living your life. So by your line of thinking, subjecting people to anything (how about waterboarding?!) should be fine by them because they’re “living their life”.
You’re right, it’s actually significantly worse, since most people would actually pay some small amount to not go through TSA.
Lost time would be blinking and finding yourself on the other side of TSA with 15 minutes having passed. Time spent in the TSA is actually worse than this, since most people see the experience as itself negative, not only in terms of opportunity cost.
The welfare costs of something people don’t want to do is significantly worse than the time you could have spent doing something else. If someone kidnapped me and tortured me in a basement for an hour, I would spend a significant amount of money to avoid that, not just because that hour could have been spent doing something else, but because the experience itself is undesirable.
If the government passed a law that said you have to get kicked in the balls before boarding the plane, and that took 5 minutes, it wouldn’t make sense to only calculate the cost in terms of the minutes the procedure takes.
Interesting perspective. I prefer standing in an airport screening line to not existing at all. I'm not sure, but getting kicked in the balls would probably be the other way around.
If other people think on average like me, then Caplan's estimates of the cost of these screening procedures would be overestimated. If they think the reverse, it would indeed be underestimated.
It’s a matter of individual preference I think. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, so I’d probably consider the waiting in line a net positive, but if there was no line I’d rather just blink and lose 5 minutes (can’t wear earbuds through security).
I think we could very reasonably estimate this with a survey.
> I'm not sure, but getting kicked in the balls would probably be the other way around.
Also, I find it hilarious that you’re not sure about this. 😂
That's interesting! I'd prefer to be alive and wait on that line even if I had no earbuds to listen to posts, I could deliberate on books or Substack posts I read lately which makes it worth it to me. I'd definitely not want to blink and lose 5 minutes of my life.
I agree, and I see existence as a net positive even more than most people, but for some reason I intuitively would prefer to simply skip something undesirable like TSA, so long as I know I would be existing on the other side.
Maybe I don’t have a belief in my own mortality, so losing a bit of time isn’t a problem.
As I've said years earlier, there will never be another hijacking of an airplane with a majority of Americans on board. Everyone realizes that they are fighting for their lives, which gives people license to do things, even elderly grandmothers, they would never consider doing under other circumstances.
This reminds me of Steve Jobs speaking to Steve Wozniak about the original Macintosh. The original boot time was like ~30 seconds or something, and Steve was trying to tell Woz to reduce that to 10 seconds. Woz kept insisting it was impossible, until Steve put it in terms of (paraphrasing with the numbers);
“We’re going to sell half a million computers and the average user will start up their computer over a thousand times. That’s over 500 million boot ups. If you save 20 seconds on each, your savings 10 human lifetimes worth of time. Fix this. There’s 10 lives depending on it.”
Such a logical—and clever—way with numbers. So, if we could only get .01% more of policy decisions to be made in this manner, how much smarter and more prosperous would our world be overall?
This is a very poorly argued post. Some objections that seem quite obvious to me:
(1) Context - So long as you can find someone capable and willing to die who can get on the plane, big passenger jets present an almost uniquely vulnerable way to kill a large number of people with a very small amount of explosive hidden on one's person. If one takes a tour of Boeing's plant one can see a cross section of a jumbo jet and observe the miracle of engineering that can safely move people comfortably at 8 miles altitude and with the outside air whisking by at near the speed of sound, -60 degrees F, and 0.2 atmospheres of pressure, all while traveling in an large but still astonishingly thin aluminum can. Ask a professional what volume of explosive, if well-shaped and positioned, would be necessary to punch a hole large enough to cause a catastrophic fragmentation of the whole airframe at cruising conditions. Not much! And then, after such an event it would be basically impossible to figure out what actually happened, with no recordings of what transpired, and small bits of flaming debris vaporizing any remaining volatiles and scattered across a truly vast area. It was mostly by pure luck that the terrorists of the time were only able to recruit the, ahem, very low-human-capital (as Hanania might say) Reid and Abdulmutallab to make first attempts, and then screw up, these operations, which fortunately provided the warning and time to adjust security measures to neutralize the threat. If it had been the original 9/11 team or the kind of people who have pulled off major terrorist atrocities elsewhere then all we would know if that a plane blew up in the sky and that some terrorist group was taking credit for it and likely planning an encore and educating that 'community' on how to pull it off.
(2) Static vs Dynamic Effects - In the static analysis - as if Reid's attempt was by some bizarre historical anomaly a total one-off that would never be attempted or imitated again - then "do nothing" might make sense in the cost-benefit analysis. But the dynamic effect of everyone in the world learning that "A guy was in fact able to smuggle a catastrophic-destruction-capable quantity of explosives onto an airplane in his shoes because the existing security measures are not able to detect that, and the government responded by doing nothing, leaving itself wide-open to subsequent attempts" is, duh, lots more subsequent attempts, until one was inevitably successful, but again, without the possibility of specific forensic attribution. Maybe they'd catch the next two idiots failing to use their shoes to blow up planes, then a plane blows up in the sky for mysterious reasons, and the government still does nothing about shoes?
(3) Technology - The reason you aren't getting a government explanation or apology is that a truly enormous amount of effort and resources has been invested in a host of highly classified overlapping technological solutions refined to detect and prevent this exact threat scenario over the past two decades without the necessity of running shoes through the x-ray machines. The moral of the story is "Yay Technological Innovation!" or "Yay Private Sector Security Technology Companies", and not "Boo - Government so bad dumb for make me take off shoes."
I definitely lose a lot of intuition when the loss is so dispersed. Like if I was abducted by aliens and they give me 2 buttons, one means everyone in the house world will lose a second of their life, the other is 5 random people will instantly lose their lives upon my pressing, the math says I should press latter (8 billion seconds = 253 years. Global life expectancy - global median age = 43 years. 43*5=215) but I don't think I would do it.
"all the delays forgetful people impose on everyone behind them in line"
I don't think that is right. In the short term and long term, the TSA can and does increase its processing speed when lines become long. I suspect that TSA checkpoints change their rules throughout the day to control the line length.
If the TSA was not able to modulate its throughput, we would see more empty lines and gigantic lines. But both are rare.
Anytime the throughput out of the checkpoint is lower than the throughput into the line, the line gets longer. So, if the checkpoint is slow for too long, like an hour, the line will become gigantic. If the throughput is faster than the demand, the line will become completely drained.
Both cases are rare in my experience. I have seen far more empty lines than gigantic lines. But, those empty lines were at funny times in small airports. When the line was empty, there would usually be only one ID checker and one belt.
I think gigantic lines are being prevented by the TSA being able to ramp up throughput throughout the day. They open more belts and more ID check stations. I have also observed that the procedures can differ even at the same airport between visits. I have even seen ID checkers go at different speeds. I wouldn't be surprised if the X-ray machines "get faster" when the lines are long.
An alternate explanation is that the rate of people entering the checkpoint decreases as the line gets longer. I don't buy it. Only a small number of people will choose not to enter a checkpoint if the line is too long. I think more people rush to get into a long line before it becomes longer than there are people who sit and wait for the line to get shorter.
What about people who go to a different checkpoint in the same terminal? Replace my references to "checkpoint" with "all checkpoints in the terminal," and the same thing is true.
Over the long run, the rate might become less variable throughout the day at airports that have had gigantic lines. If passengers get screwed over, some may arrive earlier. Instead of everyone arriving one hour before the peak of outgoing flights, the passengers may get spread over two hours.
However, I suspect the effect of spreading out airport arrival times is small and slow. People show up at largely varying times because of traffic, luggage check-in time, and risk aversion. People probably pad their arrival time at all airports instead of just the one where they have seen a gigantic line.
Unless people are taking multiple flights per day, this does not explain why checkpoints don't overflow within a day. Not many people fly more than two times per year.
If you believe that the TSA is able to modulate its throughput, you should not feel guilty about delaying people behind you. No one will miss their flight by 5 seconds. The TSA will absorb the hiccup over the next 15 minutes.
You should be deliberate and leisurely at the checkpoints. Make sure you don't lose anything while repacking. Watch that the TSA doesn't steal your stuff. Feel free to get the patdown in the back room. It will have no significant impact on you or other travelers. Don't let the checkpoint stress you out.
It will irritate the TSA and other people who haven't thought about it. The TSA will respond by making the checkpoints faster. That may be expensive. If other passengers give you a hard time, ask if they are 10 seconds from missing their flight, or let them go in front of you. If you are old or have kids, no one is going to get mad at you anyway.
Maybe someday, if everyone is leisurely in the checkpoints, the TSA will decide other rules are not worth it. Maybe they will stop patting down husbands when the wife brings bottles of breast milk. Maybe they will end the ridiculous rules about "liquids" or quit claiming their X-ray can see through metal laptop cases, but not cloth bags and plastic zippers. If the TSA changes the rules, your lack of hustle in the line would have done good for the world.
Being leisurely is a good marginal behaviour for the individual and a good universal behaviour for all passengers.
What about the people who made Europeans have to click 'Allow cookies' every time they access a website? How many minutes did these people throw away?
Caplan has criticized those people too
We have to do that in the U.S. too. Who started that?
AFAIK it's due to the GDPR, and many websites now default to it so that they do not have to have (too many) different designs for different regions.
(1*2*365*4*10^8*7)/(3600*24*365)=~65k unskilled-labor-years.
Explanation at https://niplav.site/inadequacies, updated for seven years since GDPR came into practice.
Kind of an obvious point, but airport screening procedures don't "cost" or "destroy" any portion of your life. You just spend that time standing in an airport line instead of doing something else.
It would probably make more sense to use willingness to pay.
This is just common English. When falsely convicted criminals are released after being held in prison, it's common for them to say that the state cost them X years of their life. It would be completely insane to say that, "no, actually, the state didn't cost them any years of their life because they were living their life in prison."
I don't think that would be particularly "insane". And in particular, if one wanted to estimate the welfare cost of false imprisonment, calculating as though it simply wipes the years in question off your life would lead to an overestimate.
That “doing something else” would be living your life, which for most people when given a choice doesn’t consist of standing in line and taking one’s shoes off and on.
Standing in line and putting your shoes off and on is literally living your life.
As I said, when given a choice it’s not the activity people would choose to do with their time. Anything that happens while you’re alive is living your life. So by your line of thinking, subjecting people to anything (how about waterboarding?!) should be fine by them because they’re “living their life”.
I didn't say that. Could you just read and reply to what I wrote in this thread?
No it is not, not in the slightest.
Being alive while doing something is not living your life.
Could you please stop using the Internet? You're not ready yet....
You’re right, it’s actually significantly worse, since most people would actually pay some small amount to not go through TSA.
Lost time would be blinking and finding yourself on the other side of TSA with 15 minutes having passed. Time spent in the TSA is actually worse than this, since most people see the experience as itself negative, not only in terms of opportunity cost.
The welfare costs of something people don’t want to do is significantly worse than the time you could have spent doing something else. If someone kidnapped me and tortured me in a basement for an hour, I would spend a significant amount of money to avoid that, not just because that hour could have been spent doing something else, but because the experience itself is undesirable.
If the government passed a law that said you have to get kicked in the balls before boarding the plane, and that took 5 minutes, it wouldn’t make sense to only calculate the cost in terms of the minutes the procedure takes.
Interesting perspective. I prefer standing in an airport screening line to not existing at all. I'm not sure, but getting kicked in the balls would probably be the other way around.
If other people think on average like me, then Caplan's estimates of the cost of these screening procedures would be overestimated. If they think the reverse, it would indeed be underestimated.
It’s a matter of individual preference I think. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, so I’d probably consider the waiting in line a net positive, but if there was no line I’d rather just blink and lose 5 minutes (can’t wear earbuds through security).
I think we could very reasonably estimate this with a survey.
> I'm not sure, but getting kicked in the balls would probably be the other way around.
Also, I find it hilarious that you’re not sure about this. 😂
That's interesting! I'd prefer to be alive and wait on that line even if I had no earbuds to listen to posts, I could deliberate on books or Substack posts I read lately which makes it worth it to me. I'd definitely not want to blink and lose 5 minutes of my life.
I guess I just value being alive that highly ;)
I agree, and I see existence as a net positive even more than most people, but for some reason I intuitively would prefer to simply skip something undesirable like TSA, so long as I know I would be existing on the other side.
Maybe I don’t have a belief in my own mortality, so losing a bit of time isn’t a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
TSA pre cost $75 a year and lets you keep your shoes on.
Abolish the TSA.
I said at the time that the just as effective, but much cheaper solution was to put up a "Let's Roll" poster at the entry to each jetway.
Make it clear to the passengers, and to the potential terrorists, what the responsibility of the passengers would be.
Oh, and hardening the cockpit doors was an actual good idea the government did.
As I've said years earlier, there will never be another hijacking of an airplane with a majority of Americans on board. Everyone realizes that they are fighting for their lives, which gives people license to do things, even elderly grandmothers, they would never consider doing under other circumstances.
We shouldn't give Reid all the credit--most of the credit should go to our government's idiotic response to Reid's amateurish attempt at terrorism.
Bryan's analysis is so simple and logical. And yet it's an outlier in our world of power struggles, ignorance, and fear.
This reminds me of Steve Jobs speaking to Steve Wozniak about the original Macintosh. The original boot time was like ~30 seconds or something, and Steve was trying to tell Woz to reduce that to 10 seconds. Woz kept insisting it was impossible, until Steve put it in terms of (paraphrasing with the numbers);
“We’re going to sell half a million computers and the average user will start up their computer over a thousand times. That’s over 500 million boot ups. If you save 20 seconds on each, your savings 10 human lifetimes worth of time. Fix this. There’s 10 lives depending on it.”
Woz reduced the boot time.
Such a logical—and clever—way with numbers. So, if we could only get .01% more of policy decisions to be made in this manner, how much smarter and more prosperous would our world be overall?
This is a very poorly argued post. Some objections that seem quite obvious to me:
(1) Context - So long as you can find someone capable and willing to die who can get on the plane, big passenger jets present an almost uniquely vulnerable way to kill a large number of people with a very small amount of explosive hidden on one's person. If one takes a tour of Boeing's plant one can see a cross section of a jumbo jet and observe the miracle of engineering that can safely move people comfortably at 8 miles altitude and with the outside air whisking by at near the speed of sound, -60 degrees F, and 0.2 atmospheres of pressure, all while traveling in an large but still astonishingly thin aluminum can. Ask a professional what volume of explosive, if well-shaped and positioned, would be necessary to punch a hole large enough to cause a catastrophic fragmentation of the whole airframe at cruising conditions. Not much! And then, after such an event it would be basically impossible to figure out what actually happened, with no recordings of what transpired, and small bits of flaming debris vaporizing any remaining volatiles and scattered across a truly vast area. It was mostly by pure luck that the terrorists of the time were only able to recruit the, ahem, very low-human-capital (as Hanania might say) Reid and Abdulmutallab to make first attempts, and then screw up, these operations, which fortunately provided the warning and time to adjust security measures to neutralize the threat. If it had been the original 9/11 team or the kind of people who have pulled off major terrorist atrocities elsewhere then all we would know if that a plane blew up in the sky and that some terrorist group was taking credit for it and likely planning an encore and educating that 'community' on how to pull it off.
(2) Static vs Dynamic Effects - In the static analysis - as if Reid's attempt was by some bizarre historical anomaly a total one-off that would never be attempted or imitated again - then "do nothing" might make sense in the cost-benefit analysis. But the dynamic effect of everyone in the world learning that "A guy was in fact able to smuggle a catastrophic-destruction-capable quantity of explosives onto an airplane in his shoes because the existing security measures are not able to detect that, and the government responded by doing nothing, leaving itself wide-open to subsequent attempts" is, duh, lots more subsequent attempts, until one was inevitably successful, but again, without the possibility of specific forensic attribution. Maybe they'd catch the next two idiots failing to use their shoes to blow up planes, then a plane blows up in the sky for mysterious reasons, and the government still does nothing about shoes?
(3) Technology - The reason you aren't getting a government explanation or apology is that a truly enormous amount of effort and resources has been invested in a host of highly classified overlapping technological solutions refined to detect and prevent this exact threat scenario over the past two decades without the necessity of running shoes through the x-ray machines. The moral of the story is "Yay Technological Innovation!" or "Yay Private Sector Security Technology Companies", and not "Boo - Government so bad dumb for make me take off shoes."
Without 9/11, wouldn't have had as much effect.
I definitely lose a lot of intuition when the loss is so dispersed. Like if I was abducted by aliens and they give me 2 buttons, one means everyone in the house world will lose a second of their life, the other is 5 random people will instantly lose their lives upon my pressing, the math says I should press latter (8 billion seconds = 253 years. Global life expectancy - global median age = 43 years. 43*5=215) but I don't think I would do it.
This is altogether a misleading metric to judge a policy.
How many lives would be lost by just one more terrorist act as consequence of NOT implementing a security rule?
And also the metric of 1000 lives wasted obtained by 1 minute multiplied by so many people etc--is this really valid?
Most people don't value one minute as too much as they value their life saved.
A better way would be to reckon by marginal value of one minute lost.
don't people usually take off their shoes while waiting in line?
"all the delays forgetful people impose on everyone behind them in line"
I don't think that is right. In the short term and long term, the TSA can and does increase its processing speed when lines become long. I suspect that TSA checkpoints change their rules throughout the day to control the line length.
If the TSA was not able to modulate its throughput, we would see more empty lines and gigantic lines. But both are rare.
Anytime the throughput out of the checkpoint is lower than the throughput into the line, the line gets longer. So, if the checkpoint is slow for too long, like an hour, the line will become gigantic. If the throughput is faster than the demand, the line will become completely drained.
Both cases are rare in my experience. I have seen far more empty lines than gigantic lines. But, those empty lines were at funny times in small airports. When the line was empty, there would usually be only one ID checker and one belt.
I think gigantic lines are being prevented by the TSA being able to ramp up throughput throughout the day. They open more belts and more ID check stations. I have also observed that the procedures can differ even at the same airport between visits. I have even seen ID checkers go at different speeds. I wouldn't be surprised if the X-ray machines "get faster" when the lines are long.
An alternate explanation is that the rate of people entering the checkpoint decreases as the line gets longer. I don't buy it. Only a small number of people will choose not to enter a checkpoint if the line is too long. I think more people rush to get into a long line before it becomes longer than there are people who sit and wait for the line to get shorter.
What about people who go to a different checkpoint in the same terminal? Replace my references to "checkpoint" with "all checkpoints in the terminal," and the same thing is true.
Over the long run, the rate might become less variable throughout the day at airports that have had gigantic lines. If passengers get screwed over, some may arrive earlier. Instead of everyone arriving one hour before the peak of outgoing flights, the passengers may get spread over two hours.
However, I suspect the effect of spreading out airport arrival times is small and slow. People show up at largely varying times because of traffic, luggage check-in time, and risk aversion. People probably pad their arrival time at all airports instead of just the one where they have seen a gigantic line.
Unless people are taking multiple flights per day, this does not explain why checkpoints don't overflow within a day. Not many people fly more than two times per year.
If you believe that the TSA is able to modulate its throughput, you should not feel guilty about delaying people behind you. No one will miss their flight by 5 seconds. The TSA will absorb the hiccup over the next 15 minutes.
You should be deliberate and leisurely at the checkpoints. Make sure you don't lose anything while repacking. Watch that the TSA doesn't steal your stuff. Feel free to get the patdown in the back room. It will have no significant impact on you or other travelers. Don't let the checkpoint stress you out.
It will irritate the TSA and other people who haven't thought about it. The TSA will respond by making the checkpoints faster. That may be expensive. If other passengers give you a hard time, ask if they are 10 seconds from missing their flight, or let them go in front of you. If you are old or have kids, no one is going to get mad at you anyway.
Maybe someday, if everyone is leisurely in the checkpoints, the TSA will decide other rules are not worth it. Maybe they will stop patting down husbands when the wife brings bottles of breast milk. Maybe they will end the ridiculous rules about "liquids" or quit claiming their X-ray can see through metal laptop cases, but not cloth bags and plastic zippers. If the TSA changes the rules, your lack of hustle in the line would have done good for the world.
Being leisurely is a good marginal behaviour for the individual and a good universal behaviour for all passengers.