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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

There were 769.6 Million passengers carried in 2009 in the USA (domestic and international). If each loses 30 mins of productive time on a plane because they can't use e-books or devices below 10,000 ft, that's 384,800,000 hours per year lost. Not everyone is working or learning something on a plane, but it puts things into perspective.

http://www.bts.gov/press_releases/2010/bts015_10/html/bts015...

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I have used this sort of reasoning when arguing against low speed limits implemented in the name of safety. Surely, for each 10 MPH decrease in highway speed limits, we will observe a decrease in the number of deaths per year? Presuming both this fact and the presumed political validity of speed limit reduction to decrease death rates, shouldn't our vehicles be limited to walking speeds? The reality is that most people implicitly choose an overall level of risk in their lives and optimize the apportionment of that risk among activities in a way which maximizes their happiness. If it took me four hours to commute to work because I drove 10 MPH to be "safe", I could either spend less time with my family or move my family closer to the office. Would my children end up successful in life if they rarely saw me? The end game of everyone moving closer to the office might be little specs on the globe of uber density -- an unhappy way of life for most. How about subsisting on ration kits (like those currently sold to doomsayers) as a way of minimizing the horrific risks associated with un-necessary trips to the grocery store? Obviously, people have some threshold of risk at which they choose expected quality of life over expected quantity. Airplane travel, either with or without restrictions on "portable electronic devices" can be evaluated similarly. And, given Americans' propensity to drive places at high speeds, shouldn't they be equally willing to incur what seems to be a trivial risk in order to have more productive time?

"The reality is that most people implicitly choose an overall level of risk in their lives and optimize the apportionment of that risk among activities in a way which maximizes their happiness."

Do you have anything to support this? Most economic theories say that people make tradeoffs of time and money, but not risk. Risk is generally too nebulous a concept for an individual to make any kind of rational decisions about its allocation - we have no real concept of the risk we're incurring when driving a car or stepping on a plane (and generally, our gut feeling is wrong.)

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