Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent $6 billion a year on aviation security to prevent a similar attack. The two most direct efforts to prevent airliner hijackings have been the hardening of cockpit doors and increased presence of air marshals on flights. These measures alone have cost the government and airlines $1 billion a year. Is that money well spent?
Levitt has wondered about the costs and benefits of airline security before. Now Mark Stewart, a civil engineer at the University of Newcastle and John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University, have run some numbers.
Their study, which considered the lives of airborne passengers and potential victims on the ground, found that hardened cockpit doors cost roughly $800,000 per life saved. At the same time, they calculate the air marshal program to cost roughly $180 million per life saved (assuming, that is, the marshals aren’t grounded when their names come up on the terrorist no-fly list, a problem the Washington Times reported on earlier this year).
The Federal Aviation Administration considers any innovation which costs less than $3 million per life saved to be cost-effective. By that metric, hardening cockpit doors seems to be cost effective, while the air marshals program is not.
(HT: Bruce Schneier)
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I would love to see some data regarding the change in odds of being subject to terrorist attack.
While an attack would be a horrible thing, I think our institutions are vastly over-estimating their ability to prevent it. I’m not sure that lowering the chances of being killed by terrorists from .0001% to .00005% merits the costs, restrictions, and inconveniences (the Yankees prevent people from bringing sunscreen in to the stadium).
What’s the cost/benefit on money spent on aid and diplomacy? We’ve known this in health care for a long time, prevention is more much cost-effective than treatment. I can’t help but think we’d all be safer if those billions were spent addressed the underlying cause terrorist intent rather than trying to patch every security hole in society.
How did they work out how many lives have been saved by these measures? How confident can we be in those $800,000/person estimates?
Sorry, but I gotta file this one under “Dept. of Numbers Pulled Out of Someone’s Ass”. In order to get a calculation for cost to save a life, it would have to be estimated how many lives the program has actually saved or will save. This would be pure conjecture.
@MRB
Before the attacks – people were told to cooperate with highjackers. Today – those same highjackers would be torn apart. Many of the expensive, ineffective, time consuming measures like ID checking don’t do a thing to keep a plane in the air.
Response to #7: I agree with you that the items described are not a significant threat, but that’s not the point. Those items are forbidden, so I assume the screeners aren’t seeing them and letting them pass, but rather, failed to catch them. What else might they fail to catch, then?
Noah has it right, all this money and effort at airport “security” is closing the barn door after the horses got out. The “next” 9/11 won’t use the same tactics, that’s not the way terrorism works. We’re ready for that now. As always governments/military/officials are preparing for the war they just fought and will be caught unprepared for the next attack on a soft target. Which makes it easy to demonize the enemy for being “devious” and not fighting fair. Creativity and realisitic assesment of our weaknesses will help us prepare, spending money and inconveniencing everyone won’t.
I don’t think there’s any racial profiling involved…I think that an X-ray just can’t detect a bottle of gel or a book of matches.
I’d say the only effective use of money has been on the cockpit doors. Making people feel safe by having them wastefully throw things away and wait in line for minutes/hours does nothing to stop terrorism. All it does is decrease productivity, increase waste and cause unneeded consumer spending.