The fact of the matter is that death by terrorist attack is extremely rare. Benjamin Friedman points to Nate Silver’s calculation that in the last decade of US flights, there was one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown.
Under the circumstances, investing additional resources in defending airplanes is unlikely to be a cost effective investment. It’s also worth underscoring the fact that flying in an airplane is much safer than driving. Insofar as stepped-up security makes flying both more expensive and more annoying, and therefore pushes more people to drive long distances, we’re going to cost lives rather than save them. And at the end of the day, you have to understand that terrorists are not going to weaken America by killing us all a hundred at a time with bombs. They do much more to weaken America by induces us to waste money and strangle our economy.
The last point I would make, raised by DanVerg on Twitter, is that even if airplanes were completely secure you could always kill people by detonating a bomb in some other crowded place. For example, you could blow something up in a crowded airport security line....Matthew Yglesias
So. If we're talking about bottom lines (and that's the standard by which we measure pretty much everything in the US), wouldn't you rather take one chance in 11 trillion of getting blown up while living a freer, more private and prosperous life? To judge from the comments at Yglesias's site, some Americans have caught on to the fact that the current Republican party would rather you didn't have a freer, more private and prosperous life.
Comments