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Comment by timsally | Hacker News Reader

Loss of life from 9/11 was about 3,000, which using your numbers works out to be twenty million, but the total direct and indirect costs of 9/11 are in the trillions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_t...). The insurance losses alone totaled forty billion. Innocent life lost under any circumstance is a tragedy. That said, its a multifaceted problem. Large amounts of economic damage also results in the loss of innocent life.

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Right, but I think you missed what I was saying about order of growth: the loss of life on 9/11 was very small, so economic damage due to death was relatively very small. But as loss of life increases, it makes up a larger portion of economic damage, to the point that it outweighs direct effects of terrorism.

To wit, to offset that $40b loss we could either a) prevent a 9/11 scale attack or b) prevent at most 40,000 deaths of any cause. The operative difference being 1) we know for a fact that many more than 40,000 preventable deaths will happen in the next year alone and 2) we can make a good prediction about what the cost would be to prevent them.

Sure, I think we can both agree that its a tradeoff that should be discussed, but lets not minimize how complex the analysis is. Money spent on preventing terrorist attacks can can have many-order effects (i.e. invention of multi-use technology), as can money spent on stopping preventable deaths. As a logical person I'll of course agree to spending money in the most effective place; our disagreement will be in how to do the cost-benefit analysis. For example, you mention preventable deaths as a good place to spend money, but the devil is in the details. Smoking, being overweight, and alcohol are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States and the government has been waging a campaign against these in some form or another for decades. In the case of alcohol we're actually coming up on a century. It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you should justify it.

My reason for entering the debate is I think people generally don't think about the true cost of a successful terrorist attack. For example, a successful attack on a nuclear power plant would cost $700 billion. Even if people were thinking about costs accurately, I recognize even then there will be disagreement and I'm happy to have that debate about whether anti-terror or anti-smoking is the right place to spent money. I'm just pushing for people to think more accurately about costs because the usual level of discourse is how cars kill more people than terrorists and thats just not the whole story.

> It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you should justify it.

This is a statement that applies to terrorism, not to all-cause mortality. Statistically, it is a given; we can spend $Xm addressing Y different causes of death, watch how death rates respond, and have a pretty good idea which was the best investment. That's the whole reason the various departments have this dollar figure for a human life; they do this sort of analysis all the time.

Trying to apply that sort of economic analysis to a statistically nonexistent phenomenon like major terrorist attacks is utterly useless by comparison. It doesn't matter how accurate or inaccurate our assessment of the costs is, because we have no idea how likely they are to occur in the first place, and no framework to assess what the cost of preventing them would be.

> Trying to apply that sort of economic analysis to a statistically nonexistent phenomenon like major terrorist attacks is utterly useless by comparison. It doesn't matter how accurate or inaccurate our assessment of the costs is, because we have no idea how likely they are to occur in the first place, and no framework to assess what the cost of preventing them would be.

That's complete bunk! What's so special about terrorist attacks that make them so hard to model, as compared to other things governments routinely model like inflation, technology transfer from NASA programs, etc? An absolutely ludicrous assertion.

Okay, let's do it. I'll get us started: in 2013, inflation was around 1%. About 30% of Americans were obese. There were roughly zero major terrorist attacks.

Your turn: In 2014, what will the inflation rate be? How many people will be obese? How many major terrorist attacks will occur?

Approximate answers are fine.

You're completely off the rails here. You've devolved back into discussing the probability of dying from a terrorist attack instead of a whole system analysis. Some questions to answer your questions. Do you think the government knows things about the economy they don't release to the public but use to inform their monetary policy? Do you think the same might be true for terrorist attacks and their security posture? Does the fact that you don't know something mean that it is inherently unknowable?

So your answer is that you have no idea what the chances of a major terrorist attack are, and no way of finding out, but you think the government does, because they have secrets.

Well, there's no way for me to argue with that. Good talk.

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