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It's not just about lives saved. This type of analysis is complicated because the costs are not always straightforward to analyze: https://news.ycombinator.com/

It's not just about lives saved. This type of analysis is complicated because the costs are not always straightforward to analyze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Cushman 13y ago
Is it that complicated? An American life is generally considered (by our government) to have a value somewhere in millions[0]. Back-of-the-napkin math suggests that from an order-of-growth analysis, it may well be just about lives saved. (Roughly, each million lives saved saves a trillion dollars in economic value.) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_value_of_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_... As a lower bound, the lifetime earnings of an individual are $1m and up: http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf
- timsally 13y ago
  Loss of life from 9/11 was about 3,000, which using your numbers works out to be twenty million, but the total direct and indirect costs of 9/11 are in the trillions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_t...). The insurance losses alone totaled forty billion. Innocent life lost under any circumstance is a tragedy. That said, its a multifaceted problem. Large amounts of economic damage also results in the loss of innocent life.
  - Cushman 13y ago
    Right, but I think you missed what I was saying about order of growth: the loss of life on 9/11 was very small, so economic damage due to death was relatively very small. But as loss of life increases, it makes up a larger portion of economic damage, to the point that it outweighs direct effects of terrorism. To wit, to offset that $40b loss we could either a) prevent a 9/11 scale attack or b) prevent at most 40,000 deaths of any cause. The operative difference being 1) we know for a fact that many more than 40,000 preventable deaths will happen in the next year alone and 2) we can make a good prediction about what the cost would be to prevent them.
    - timsally 13y ago
      Sure, I think we can both agree that its a tradeoff that should be discussed, but lets not minimize how complex the analysis is. Money spent on preventing terrorist attacks can can have many-order effects (i.e. invention of multi-use technology), as can money spent on stopping preventable deaths. As a logical person I'll of course agree to spending money in the most effective place; our disagreement will be in how to do the cost-benefit analysis. For example, you mention preventable deaths as a good place to spend money, but the devil is in the details. Smoking, being overweight, and alcohol are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States and the government has been waging a campaign against these in some form or another for decades. In the case of alcohol we're actually coming up on a century. It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you should justify it. My reason for entering the debate is I think people generally don't think about the true cost of a successful terrorist attack. For example, a successful attack on a nuclear power plant would cost $700 billion. Even if people were thinking about costs accurately, I recognize even then there will be disagreement and I'm happy to have that debate about whether anti-terror or anti-smoking is the right place to spent money. I'm just pushing for people to think more accurately about costs because the usual level of discourse is how cars kill more people than terrorists and thats just not the whole story.
      - Cushman 13y ago
        > It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you should justify it. This is a statement that applies to terrorism, not to all-cause mortality. Statistically, it is a given; we can spend $Xm addressing Y different causes of death, watch how death rates respond, and have a pretty good idea which was the best investment. That's the whole reason the various departments have this dollar figure for a human life; they do this sort of analysis all the time. Trying to apply that sort of economic analysis to a statistically nonexistent phenomenon like major terrorist attacks is utterly useless by comparison. It doesn't matter how accurate or inaccurate our assessment of the costs is, because we have no idea how likely they are to occur in the first place, and no framework to assess what the cost of preventing them would be.
Ramsus 13y ago
This is straightforward: We've spent more than 5 trillion on the war against terrorism, homeland security, NSA, and other measures as a response to 9/11. http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ If you want to talk money and not lives, then by your citation we're spending the equivalent economical impact of a large terrorist attack every month to prevent something that is more rare than being struck with lightning from happening.
- timsally 13y ago
  That's exactly my point. It would have been better to spend large amounts of money preventing 9/11 from happening so we wouldn't have spent the 5 trillion we did on our reaction to it (never mind the cost it had to our national psyche). If someone hits a skyscraper in NYC or the Pentagon with what is effectively a cruise missile, the US military is going to be on the ground to get the bad guys within the month and we'll stay until we find them. That's just a law of nature; its what the people demand from their government, not just in America but in general. Given that, it makes a lot of sense to spend money on preventing terrorism. The direct and indirect costs of a successful terrorist attack are huge.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Cushman 13y ago

Is it that complicated? An American life is generally considered (by our government) to have a value somewhere in millions[0]. Back-of-the-napkin math suggests that from an order-of-growth analysis, it may well be just about lives saved. (Roughly, each million lives saved saves a trillion dollars in economic value.) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_value_of_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_... As a lower bound, the lifetime earnings of an individual are $1m and up: http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf

timsally 13y ago
Loss of life from 9/11 was about 3,000, which using your numbers works out to be twenty million, but the total direct and indirect costs of 9/11 are in the trillions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_t...). The insurance losses alone totaled forty billion. Innocent life lost under any circumstance is a tragedy. That said, its a multifaceted problem. Large amounts of economic damage also results in the loss of innocent life.
- Cushman 13y ago
  Right, but I think you missed what I was saying about order of growth: the loss of life on 9/11 was very small, so economic damage due to death was relatively very small. But as loss of life increases, it makes up a larger portion of economic damage, to the point that it outweighs direct effects of terrorism. To wit, to offset that $40b loss we could either a) prevent a 9/11 scale attack or b) prevent at most 40,000 deaths of any cause. The operative difference being 1) we know for a fact that many more than 40,000 preventable deaths will happen in the next year alone and 2) we can make a good prediction about what the cost would be to prevent them.
  - timsally 13y ago
    Sure, I think we can both agree that its a tradeoff that should be discussed, but lets not minimize how complex the analysis is. Money spent on preventing terrorist attacks can can have many-order effects (i.e. invention of multi-use technology), as can money spent on stopping preventable deaths. As a logical person I'll of course agree to spending money in the most effective place; our disagreement will be in how to do the cost-benefit analysis. For example, you mention preventable deaths as a good place to spend money, but the devil is in the details. Smoking, being overweight, and alcohol are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States and the government has been waging a campaign against these in some form or another for decades. In the case of alcohol we're actually coming up on a century. It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you should justify it. My reason for entering the debate is I think people generally don't think about the true cost of a successful terrorist attack. For example, a successful attack on a nuclear power plant would cost $700 billion. Even if people were thinking about costs accurately, I recognize even then there will be disagreement and I'm happy to have that debate about whether anti-terror or anti-smoking is the right place to spent money. I'm just pushing for people to think more accurately about costs because the usual level of discourse is how cars kill more people than terrorists and thats just not the whole story.
    - Cushman 13y ago
      > It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you should justify it. This is a statement that applies to terrorism, not to all-cause mortality. Statistically, it is a given; we can spend $Xm addressing Y different causes of death, watch how death rates respond, and have a pretty good idea which was the best investment. That's the whole reason the various departments have this dollar figure for a human life; they do this sort of analysis all the time. Trying to apply that sort of economic analysis to a statistically nonexistent phenomenon like major terrorist attacks is utterly useless by comparison. It doesn't matter how accurate or inaccurate our assessment of the costs is, because we have no idea how likely they are to occur in the first place, and no framework to assess what the cost of preventing them would be.

Ramsus 13y ago

This is straightforward: We've spent more than 5 trillion on the war against terrorism, homeland security, NSA, and other measures as a response to 9/11. http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ If you want to talk money and not lives, then by your citation we're spending the equivalent economical impact of a large terrorist attack every month to prevent something that is more rare than being struck with lightning from happening.

timsally 13y ago
That's exactly my point. It would have been better to spend large amounts of money preventing 9/11 from happening so we wouldn't have spent the 5 trillion we did on our reaction to it (never mind the cost it had to our national psyche). If someone hits a skyscraper in NYC or the Pentagon with what is effectively a cruise missile, the US military is going to be on the ground to get the bad guys within the month and we'll stay until we find them. That's just a law of nature; its what the people demand from their government, not just in America but in general. Given that, it makes a lot of sense to spend money on preventing terrorism. The direct and indirect costs of a successful terrorist attack are huge.