Quiet Declarations

As I was waiting in the airport security line last week, I began thinking about the costs and benefits of being protected against a terrorist attack on my plane.  When I got back, I went to my computer and looked up the following statistics on the DOT’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics webpage:

• 4,779,479 vehicle passenger miles, 2002-05 avg.
• 532,262 air passenger miles, 2002-05 avg.
• 0.19 deaths per 100 million aircraft miles, 2002-05 avg.
• 1.47 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles, 2002-05 avg.
• 769.4 million airline passengers in 2007  (745.7 in 2005)
• $6.4 billion TSA budget in 2007  ($5.3B in 2005)

You can obviously crunch the fatalities data a bunch of different ways (e.g. vehicle miles vs. passenger miles, number of miles vs. number of trips, fatality rate vs. casualty rate), but regardless, we seem clearly willing as a society to incur a vehicle fatality rate much higher than the current airline fatality rate.

We are currently spending $6.4 billion in TSA spending plus around 700 million in lost labor hours from travelers having to allot extra time at the airport for security purposes.  These are real costs to productivity and happiness, and for at least some of this time and money the next highest valued use would probably have saved lives we don’t even know about.

Given our willingness to incur up to the vehicle fatality rate, if we think of the difference in vehicle and aircraft fatality rates as a “fatality cushion,” then isn’t it reasonable to consider reducing our airline security by up to the amount required to keep the aircraft fatality rate less than or equal to the vehicle fatality rate?  In fact, it appears that air travel is so much safer than vehicle travel that we could probably eliminate security for everything except bomb detection and cockpit security and still not be worse off.  There’s nothing demonstrably worse about a plane attack than a ground attack unless the assailant is willing to commit suicide, and if it’s equally likely that passengers and assailants have items that can be used as weapons, the odds of successfully bringing down a plane full of passengers who remember 9/11 are not going to increase by much.

The most reasonable objection, it seems to me, is that we should be spending any amount of money and time to prevent any life from being taken.  Except that to defend that position, you would have to be willing to do a whole bunch of other things — most notably, changing vehicle laws and regulations to bring vehicle fatalities down to the level of airline fatalities.  What else am I missing?

By the way, I see that TSA’s budget in 2007 was a 20.8% increase from 2005, but the number of passengers in 2007 increased only 3.2% from 2005.  Shouldn’t the budget per passenger decrease as we get our infrastructure in place?  I’m just saying…

The Titans are 4-0 and undefeated in September for the first time in franchise history.

ESPN’s College Gameday is coming to Vanderbilt on Saturday, for the first time in history, as the #19 Commodores (4-0, 2-0 SEC) host the #13 Auburn Tigers (4-1, 2-1 SEC).

The University of Tennessee is 1-3 (0-2 SEC).

Concerned about greed in the wake of the bailout?  Two perspectives you may not have heard:

A Cure for Greed by Eduardo Porter
An Open Letter to my Friends on the Left by Prof. Steven Horwitz

Concerned about the nuts and bolts of the bailout itself?  Two perspectives you may not have heard:

100 Economists on the Bailout
BB&T President on the Bailout

Richard Posner has one of the better lay person summaries of the financial crisis and bailout package that I’ve seen, and co-blogger Gary Becker follows with a deeper and slightly more technical bailout analysis.

Yeah, an entire city having no gas isn’t great…. but at least it’s not so bad that we can’t inject a little humor into the situation!

Reference: The Tennessee Gas “Crisis”

Every time I buy bagels for a work meeting in DC, my colleagues from the Northeast end up in a conversation about how you can’t get a good bagel outside of New York or Boston.  Apparently not even the faux Southerners of DC can replicate this northeastern delicacy.

Here’s what I had for breakfast in a Nashville restaurant on Saturday morning: two scrambled eggs, country ham and bacon cured on the premises, sausage patties, stone ground grits with a touch of sugar, made-from-scratch biscuits with red-eye gravy or homemade preserves, and Dr. Pepper served in a mason jar, all for $12.  I think Southerners pretty well have the lockdown on the DC breakfast complaints.

When I decided to visit Nashville this weekend, I didn’t realize I was flying into a gas crisis!  Apparently 85% of gas stations in the Nashville area were empty on Friday, and the shortage is expected to continue until Wednesday or Thursday.  Prices have been averaging over $4 per gallon in the meantime.  I had a busy weekend planned so my rental car and I became unwilling participants.

 As best I can tell, the timeline of how this happened is something like the following:

1. Hurricane Ike is forecasted to hit Texas, which prompts an unusual run on gas stations and drives up the price.  When the hurricane actually does hit landfall, it causes some service disruption to the major pipeline serving Middle Tennessee, causing prices to further increase.

2. The media picks up coverage of the gas prices and also highlights a couple of gas stations that are out of gas because of the pipeline disruption.  This basically incites a panic and causes a run on the stations.  People with three-quarters of a tank of gas are driving around for hours to find gas and then waiting in line for hours to get it.

3. Every gas station now either has no gas or really long lines all the time, which is prolonging the panic.

The local government appears to be doing the right thing, which is to tell goverment agencies to conserve their gas usage and ask citizens to calm down and be patient.  My main thought here is that this is precisely the sort of problem that price increases are supposed to help fix.  Gas stations are hesitant to raise their prices further because there have already been thousands of complaints of “gouging” at what’s probably an average $1 per gallon increase.  Therefore, the people who don’t really need gas immediately aren’t further deterred from filling up, the people with plenty of time aren’t further deterred from waiting in long lines, and the people who already have gas aren’t further incentivized to conserve.

The primary argument against price increases in time of crisis is it hurts the poor.  If you’re a low income worker with two jobs and children at home and you have to drive to work every day, which would you rather have: the option to purchase gas with a short wait at a temporarily higher price, or no option to purchase gas at any price, save for the occasional chance at driving across town for a multi-hour wait to get gas at the normal price assuming the station doesn’t run out before you make it to the pump?

The Titans are 3-0 (2-0 division), while the other teams in the division are 1-2, 1-2, and 0-2.  They have the #1 ranked scoring defense and their two starting cornerbacks are #1 and #2 in the league in interceptions.  Caveat: their opponents are now a combined 1-7.  Lingering question: will the Vince Young soap opera ultimately keep Tennessee under the media radar or slowly destroy the team from within?

Vanderbilt is now 4-0 (2-0 conference) and ranked for the first time since 1984 – #21 in the AP poll and #25 in the USA Today poll.  Also of note: Tennessee is 1-2 (0-1 conference) and unranked.  Perhaps more importantly, they are outscoring opponents 52-10 in the second half of games, which means Happy learned to putt!  Caveat: 4 of their last 8 opponents are currently ranked #3, #4, #15, and  #16.  Lingering question: are they going to win their two eminently winable games and go to their first bowl since 1982, or will this year’s roller coaster ride be particularly devastating?

Even my high school is 5-0 so far… call this the “God Owes Chad a Favor” edition.

It has come to my attention that I had a setting turned on that required you to be logged in to comment on my blog.  This is both cumbersome and useless to me, so I have corrected the setting.  Henceforth, feel free to comment without a login.

From the Times article entitled Politicians Point Fingers, Assign Blame:

“This crisis serves as a stark reminder of the failures of crony capitalism and an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary,” Mr. Obama said, alluding contemptuously to “Washington lobbyists” and “special interests” who rake in dollars and hope, perhaps not too fervently, “that prosperity trickles down to the rest.”

Americans, and people all over the world, are better off than they were 30 years ago by nearly any measure.  Higher percentages have refrigerators, microwaves, access to inexpensive food, clean water, and leisure time.  Families at all income levels have access to affordable products that were once unimaginable, such as computers and cell phones.  We’ve cut the number people living in extreme poverty in half in a generation.  And although it is a statistical certainty that we’ll always have a bottom 20% of income earners, longitudinal studies of U.S. households show that most people who start in the bottom bracket move out of it over the course of their lifetimes.  This is precisely because prosperity does trickle down to the rest.  The reason Obama has to use the modifier “crony” is because more people are starting to see the word capitalism in a positive light.

But clearly many people do not believe this, even when presented with the facts, or else politicians wouldn’t make comments like the above so often.  And I’m curious to know why.  Here are my leading theories:

1.  People don’t care about absolute prosperity, they care about relative prosperity.  When Joe Six Pack sees Richie Rich down the street it makes him angry, because Joe’s a smart guy and a hard worker and how come Richie’s got it so good?  It must be luck or cheating or nepotism, and that’s just not how the world ought to work.  Economic growth allows for an inequality in which some bad people can achieve more than some good people, and that is just not right.  If these are the consequences of economic growth, then economic growth shouldn’t be the priority.

2.  People believe we would be living simpler and happier lives if it weren’t for the greed that fuels capitalism.  We could have focused on helping the poor at the expense of economic growth – and sure, we wouldn’t have so much stuff now, but all this wealth has created products we don’t really need, polluted the environment, and caused many people to lead unhealthier lives.  And look in particular at all the places in the world that have been seen their culture and way of life destroyed by capitalism.  If these are the consequences of economic growth, then economic growth shouldn’t be the priority.

Am I right or wrong?  What other theories are out there that I’m missing?  What leads so many people to believe that people are worse off by economic growth?

Newmark links to an article on quitting, in which two storied life axioms are pitted against one another: “quitters never win and winners never quit” vs. “you gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.”

A lot of people?  Perhaps more people than you can possibly imagine — people called investors and businesspeople and shareholders and consumers involved in a complex decentralized organism called a market?

Wait, that can’t be right.  Clearly it’s a politician… a single politician, helping his cronies at the expense of the rest of us.  Thank goodness I watch the news so I can understand how the financial sector works.

[Update 9/16/08: Megan tackles the same issue and is far more informative, albeit equally snarky, on the topic.]

Well duh, Obama’s not going to run a 50-state strategy.  He’s not going to accept federal campaign funding when he’s raising $60 million a month.  He’s not going to avoid negative campaigning.  He’s not going to overemphasize policy specifics that can be picked apart by opponents.  He’s going to promise unrealistic changes like educating every child and affordable healthcare for everyone and energy independence in 10 years.

And what’s McCain going to do?  With a few tactical and policy differences, pretty much the same thing.  This is called a campaign, and what amazes me about the rhetoric is how many people think the tactics are supposed to be different just because “change” is written in big letters on campaign posters.

One of my substantive realizations since coming to Washington is that Washington is Washington, and the only reason I ever believed the contrary is because I was naïve and uninformed.  You can change what specific topics get discussed in Washington, but you can’t change the way Washington works.  Is there anyone out there who thinks that you can, and if so, what is your evidence?  Who has ever gotten anything done in Washington that hasn’t done so through a conventional political machine?

Not sure what to make of this chart, other than it probably reinforces my stereotypes….

Arnold tells it like it is:

To me, political campaigns are not sacred events, to be eagerly anticipated and avidly followed. They are brutal assaults on reason. I look forward to election season about as much as a gulf coast resident looks forward to hurricane season.

He then explains a few truths upon which all voters should reflect.