A take on homeland security
Since September 11, 2001, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on “Homeland security.” The results are mixed, if measurable at all. An anonymous CSO writes:
To be sure, there has not been another terrorist attack in the United States since 2001, so presumably all that additional money has prevented other lives from being taken because of terrorism. But what about the other leading causes of death? Could the money spent on additional defense and homeland security have saved more lives if it had been applied in other areas?
Presumption, as any security person knows, is one of the biggest causes of systemic failure. Unfortunately, this is little more than a demonstration of the government’s post hoc ergo propter hoc or “coincidental correlation.” A follows B, therefore A is because of B. Perhaps it’s true, perhaps it’s not. How do we know? How do we measure? Our anonymous CSO begins to unravel the question, and it’s worth a look.
Let us assume, conservatively, that $300B has been spent on “security” because of what happened on September 11th. This does not fully assign the cost of the war in Iraq, because I think it was simply inevitable given the political actors involved, and had little to do with terrorism.
If you take the following variables into account:
- Approximately $24B in payments by insurance carriers for the September 11th attack. (Some data here in PDF.)
- Approximately 3,000 deaths associated, with an average (assumed) salary of $100K across 10 years, making another $3B
There are other costs, but this means that to “avoid” around $30B in loss, we have spent $300B. This is hyper-simplified and ignores millions of variables, but the simple point is this. What are we truly buying?
Some of us in the security business are not sure that over the long-term (20+ years), we have actually reduced the risk. Instead, our involvement in the middle-east and other areas may have increased the long-term risk, even if you ignore the possibility of a democracy occurring (still not a certainty). This is a lot of variables unaccounted for in this equation.
As the anonymous CSO points out, heart disease killed over 200 times as many people in 2001, but the amount of money spent was trivial in comparison. If the job of the government is to protect and safeguard its citizenry, then we are not receiving a very effective result for our trillions of dollars.
Terrorism is sad and depressing and a “bad thing,” but as any security person knows, no risk is completely avoidable. The believe that risk of anything can be reduced to zero is psychotic, and so we must ask what cost the reduction in risk, and are we receiving a proper benefit for the cost? Would $100B of that have “cured cancer?” Reduced deaths heart disease by 50%?
I realize this post is somewhat inflammatory, but we must make our decisions in society in a dispassionate way, and end our continual emotional appeal to “the memories” of people. Death is a sad thing, but some amount will always occur. The question is, how do we most effectively reduce it? A person dead from heart disease is no worse or better than a person dead from a terrorist attack. The familial loss is the same.
[via Bruce Schneier]
This entry was posted at 3:49 pm on 22 April 2005 and is filed under Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
And another thing – the Captcha system you have sucks eggs. I strongly suspect that a bot would be able to deal with it more easily than a person can. I never did figure out the first page (about 15 errors in your logs, I think), and had to copy my comment and reload the page.
OK, will look at the CAPTCHA system to see if I can make it a bit more reasonable.
As for disease, I agree, but there are tons of diseases like many forms of cancer, that are not “preventable,” or we have no idea how to in any reasonable way. The fact of the matter is that we can “save” 3,000 lives a year much more easily and cheaply, and that, in the end of it, is what I think is important. Others may disagree.
I think you’re basically right here. The emotional impact of something like 9/11 is obviously huge, but when we start letting those types of emotions control our public policy, we usually make bad decisions.
On a slightly different note, let’s assume that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks (which I don’t believe for a second). Is killing 100k completely innocent Iraqi citizens really a good way to respond?
FYI, the captcha worked fine for me.
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The comparison to heart disease is a false one. Why? To a very large extent, individuals can control their level of risk for that. That means that government research, while not wasted, is in pursuit of something that can be ameliorated by personal actions.
Terrorist actions are not in any way shape or form controllable by individual citizens – and a failure by the government to attempt prevention on utilitarian grounds would result in ridicule – and political losses.