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Saturday, October 23, 2004

Hack-ro Economics

This article was one I found interesting. It compares the cost/benefit analysis of executing murderers with an assumed cost/benefit analysis of executing computer hackers and virus writers.

As with any economics discussion, assumptions on data is a large part of the argument, but one fact with which I wholeheartedly agree is summed up at the tail end of the article:
As for myself, I hold that the government's job is to improve our lives, not to impose its morality… But this essential point remains: Governments exist largely to supply protections that, for one reason or another, we can't purchase in the marketplace. Those governments perform best when they supply the protections we value most. We can measure their performance only if we are willing to calculate costs and benefits and to respect what our calculations tell us, even when it's counterintuitive. Any policymaker who won't do this kind of arithmetic is fundamentally unserious about policy.
Interesting concept, government taking care of its people without imposing morality. Wonder if that would work here in America?

Economics was without question my favorite set of classes in college. Once grounded in the basics of micro- and macro-econ, it’s only a small leap to begin to discuss public policy in black-and-white, cost-and-benefit terms.

What got me interested in this Slate article was another written by the same author under the subject of “Everyday Economics.” By now, I’m sure you’ve read about the woman on the plane with the 14 Middle Eastern “musicians,” who spent all flight worrying the ever living hell out of everyone else on board with their behavior. In this article, titled “The $100 Terrorist Insurance Plan,” Landsburg hypothesizes that airline passengers should be ethnically screened. However, these passengers who are identified by name, country of origin, appearance, or color as more likely threats, should be compensated $100 by the airline for the fifteen to twenty minutes of inconvenience they had to endure being singled out for questioning. And further, airline passengers would – in theory – gladly pay an additional $7-$10 per ticket to cover the cost of this profiling.

Landsburg states, “Paying people for their inconvenience is a good idea first because it is fair, and second because its very fairness makes it a plausible alternative to the current policy of pretending that old Midwestern women are as dangerous as young Middle Eastern men.”

Amen.

Almost makes me want to change my name to Mohammad Jihad.

Almost. I don’t fly that much.


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