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Comment by rdouble | Hacker News Reader

If you're going to do a quantitative analysis of the effects of terrorism you'd need to analyze effects other than deaths. 9/11 caused the loss of 430,000 jobs, $40B in insurance payouts, damage to lower Manhattan that still isn't fully repaired, $100B losses in the financial exchanges, probably close to $1T in economic losses total, even before taking into account the misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Likewise, the Boston Marathon bombing was far less devastating than 9/11 but still caused an estimated $333M in damage.

It does suck that more people die in car accidents but no single car accident can cause a billion dollars in damage.

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This is the most ironic comment I have read in months.

You are effectively saying, "You must include X when considering A." You then completely ignore X when considering B.

9/11 caused the loss of 430,000 jobs

35,000 people die per year in car accidents. 9/11 happened 12 years ago. That means 420,000 DIED. That's worse than losing your job.

$40B in insurance payouts

Progressive alone pays out about $12B per year in auto accident claims. They're only the 4th largest insurer in the United States representing 8% of the market. If the ratio holds out there are approximately $150B per year in auto accident claims but admittedly I couldn't find a direct source for that. $40B in the last 12 years is a drop in the bucket.

I could go on and calculate the rest, but I hope you get the point which is your cherry picked (and made up) statistics don't hold a candle to other problems we have and relatively ignore.

Sure, but I'm saying a single event caused this. You're talking about the sum total of all auto accidents over 12 years. Even 12 years of auto accidents don't add up to one major terrorism event. I'm not saying I agree with the way the USA handles terrorism, but it does seem like something you want to avoid. If there was another 9/11 or a Boston bombing happened every year, the country's economy would be massively screwed. My numbers are all from wikipedia's page about the economic aftermath of 9/11 and a Boston Herald article about the Boston bombing.

The Banqiao Reservoir Dam failures in 1975 cost an estimated 171,000 lives and made 11 million people homeless. That was a single event too. By your line of reasoning that makes 9/11 pretty much irrelevant and we should all care about dam security instead, ignoring that it was an extreme outlier, and that aggregate deaths from other causes quickly outdistanced dam failures again.

Clearly there are psychological issues at play that makes us care greatly about large disasters, but that still does not make it rational to compare individual events to decide what resources to use to fight a type of event as a whole over long periods of time.

You mentioning 'psychological issues' reminded me of the (super interesting) book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In that book there is something about our ability to asses risk and emotionally perceive danger that is biased by dangers that typically occurred during many thousand years of human evolution - physical violence is evolutionary very old and that's why we react to it strongly. On the other side there are things that might be more dangerous (like obesity which kills way more people than terrorism) but evolutionary these are relatively new and we have yet to develop the 'sense of danger' to them. [I am just paraphrasing that book - any mistakes made here are mine and Daniel Kahneman is totally innocent in this.]

You're talking about the sum total of all auto accidents over 12 years

I'm talking about the sum total of all auto accidents over 12 years an the sum of all terrorist attacks over 12 years.

Even 12 years of auto accidents don't add up to one major terrorism event.

How so? 420,000 people died in car accidents. 2,700 people died in the biggest terrorism event to ever hit the U.S. So that's deaths. Economic impact - no brainer, car accidents have bigger economic impact. By any measure, car accidents have a bigger impact in aggregate than terrorist attacks in aggregate.

If there was another 9/11 or a Boston bombing happened every year, the country's economy would be massively screwed.

I don't even know what to say to someone that writes this.

Well to be honest, I don't know what to say to you, either.

Comparing the Boston Bombing to 9/11 doesn't really make sense. The OKC bombing, that's a much better comparison.

Attacks on the level of the Boston Bombing happen every day in various countries around the world. But something like 9/11 or OKC, that kind of stuff doesn't happen every day. One of those was by far the most incredible act of terrorism in the modern world. Heck, even car bombs that kill 100+ seem to happen every couple months.

The harm of terrorism or the harm of our irrational response to terrorism?

Obviously 9/11 didn't start the Iraq War, President Bush did. He may have done that in a state of belief that the two were connected, but we should not repeat his mistake.

It seems odd to me to lump in how much we poured into terrorism over and above the direct damages, and not to lump in with car accidents how much money we pour into auto safety, road maintenance, and so on.

The general point is that we over-respond to trauma, both in our daily lives and a macro society level. Clean living is more important and has broader effects on your life than crime, but it is less sexy on the evening news. Just like car safety and terrorism.

The figures I gave were the direct damages, from wikipedia.

How do you end up with 430,000 lost jobs from direct damages due to the attack? No, I'm pretty sure those are damages due to the reactions to the attack, not damages due to the attack itself.

In New York City, there were approximately 430,000 jobs were lost and $2.8 billion in lost wages over the three months following the 9/11 attacks

That's just the number on wikipedia. 430,000 people lost their jobs in the 3 months after the attack. I supposed you could argue that it's not direct damages in the sense that 430K people were not all office workers in the WTC, but if they lost their job within 3 months of the attack it seems like the job loss is pretty directly related.

And, as a former NYC resident I would not at all be surprised if 430K people really did directly lose their job. The sheer number of people working in that area is immense. I remember an interview at the time with a guy whose bodega located down by Wall Street was destroyed, and he said he did $80K per week in business. And that's just one dude selling sodas, bottled water, cigarettes, etc.

Anybody who lost their job directly due to the attack would have lost it that day. Three months means job losses due to fear in the financial markets, economic pessimism, fear of subsequent attacks, etc. etc.

In other words, imagine a hypothetical world where the reaction to 9/11 was "damn, let's figure out who was behind this, go arrest them, and rebuild and carry on with our lives" rather than the "holy shit, let's declare a war on terrorism" reaction that actually happened. Do 430,000 jobs still get lost? No, I seriously doubt it. You lose some jobs because a bunch of office space got destroyed, but most of those jobs are still needed and will simply be relocated.

I've seen other figures that suggest that about 80K people lost their jobs immediately. I guess I'm not convinced that the rest of the job losses were due to economic pessimism and fear in the financial markets. I was assuming it included the bodega guy, the guy working for the bodega guy, couriers, tailors, every other small business owner in the area, people servicing those small business owners, the carpet cleaners, window washers, the outsourced IT guys, people servicing the physical infrastructure of the area, people who worked in the other buildings. etc. I could be totally off base, but blasting out part of the infrastructure of a city of 19M people seems like it could cause a relatively "direct" 2% job loss over 3 months.

The thing about job loss from the destruction of buildings is that most of it comes right back.. in a different building. It's only bad locally and temporarily.

I don't know if that's necessarily true. The downtown of the small city where I grew up was destroyed by a simultaneous flood and fire and most of the downtown businesses simply disappeared forever. Many small businesses are in economically tenuous positions and a catastrophic event will wipe them out. This causes all the employes to lose their jobs, and a chain reaction to other small businesses who relied upon the destroyed businesses. Applied to NYC scale, suggesting the job loss numbers mean "direct" unemployment in this sense seems reasonable to me, but I could be wrong.

This is deeply irrational.

The financial markets depend upon stability and law and order. They cannot function without it. The fear that markets and industries could be crippled with a simple bomb (not due to the reaction, but due to the event) did massive damage to the markets, which resonated and caused significant economic collateral damage. This is obvious given that the reaction to 9/11 was actually quite sedate for some time, and massive enterprises like the NSA's current adventure came about much later.

What markets and industries could actually be crippled with a simple bomb?

Exchanges, for one, in virtually any industry. Recall that one of the primary concerns after 9/11 were the NYSE, Nasdaq, Mercantile Exchange, etc. Banking centers. Oil refineries. Port. Etc.

I'm sure every major exchange has contingency plans to operate out of a backup location. I'm not aware of any single point of failure in banking, oil, or cargo, and if there were, mundane threats like weather would far outweigh terrorism anyway.

Singapore is a major point of failure in banking, oil and cargo.

But can't be taken out by a simple bomb, not even remotely close.

I think we disagree on what "crippled" means. You have taken it to mean "no longer functions or exists", which I think many handicapable people would disagree with. It simply means that it operates at a measurably diminished capacity in some regard, which with the economy can have profound implications.

If the NYSE building were bombed on an operating day, it would absolutely have dramatic financial repercussions, and that market would absolutely be crippled. Would some simile reappear? Of course it would, just as government would reappear if a full capital building were attacked. But the impact would be major and it would be felt.

If the traders could be rational enough to pick up and move to new temporary offices a few blocks over and carry on with their business the next day, the consequences of a NYSE bombing would not be so dire. The dramatic financial repercussions you mention would certainly happen, but only because people would panic.

correlation apparently thinks 9/11 strikes in NY were caused by a simple bomb instead of planes crashing into buildings.

I confess to pondering: Is your reply sarcasm? Raw stupidity? An attempt at being clever? Sorry, but you fail miserably at all of those.

No, 300bps, 9/11 brought a sense among both the populace and business that big, bad things can happen by just a few people with ill will. The response was a realization that the basic security and law and order could be so easily overridden.

But good effort, regardless.

How big part of the damage is caused by the terrorist attack and how big part is caused by (over?)reaction to it? If after each car crash the car traffic in the whole city had to be stopped and people were advised not to leave their homes until the 'hit and run' culprit was caught... how expensive would that be?

The numbers I gave were the cost of damage alone, not the response.

I don't know exact numbers but the numbers you provided do not seem to add up. The Boston Marathon bombing caused an estimated $333M in damage directly? I don't think you can do direct damage like that with primitive pressure cooker bomb. And if you count lost human lives (their insurance etc.) than it's comparable to a bus accident or a bit bigger storm. In my eyes the reaction to it still seems like hysterical overreaction. Calculate all deaths caused by car accidents and compare that to the damage caused by terrorism... and it still seems that the 'war on cars' would be more reasonable than war on terrorism.

  > 9/11 caused the loss of 430,000 jobs

Actually it is possible there were net jobs gained, when you add the increases to national security apparatus.

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