Economics versus the TSA

Art Carden
Forbes
Nov. 24, 2010

As I wrote a few months ago, a small handful of simple-but-profound ideas do the heavy lifting in economics. They can be applied to almost everything, airport security included. I'll leave the moral philosophy of it all to abler minds than mine (here are James Otteson and Michael Munger, for example), but some of the principles of economics have a lot to teach us about airport security...

1. There is no free lunch (or free pat-down). When you do one thing, you give up the opportunity to do another. Even if the TSA has made us safer and saved lives (it hasn't), these saved lives have come at a cost. For every life saved in a TSA-prevented terrorist attack, more lives are lost on highways as people substitute away from air travel and toward driving. Getting rid of the TSA would mean fewer dead people, on net. That's a win in my book.

2. People Respond to Incentives. When you change the costs and benefits of something, people change their behavior. By making flying more costly, the TSA encourages more people to drive. Even when we take terrorism into account, flying is far safer than driving. As a result of the TSA's new "enhanced pat-downs" and nude imaging, people are going to die today, tomorrow, and indeed every day from now on who wouldn't die if flying were more convenient.

Read More