Are TSA checkpoints worth the expense?

Kriston Capps reports: "Using the same formula* as the researchers (and some similar assumptions), I estimated the same costs for airport pre-boarding security. TSA checkpoints have an annual cost per life saved of $667,000,000—two-thirds of one billion dollars."

Why does the government require screenings if the cost per life saved is so high?

Can you think of other policies the government could impose that would save lives at a lower cost? Why doesn't the government impose those policies?

Best way to reduce global warming is ...

 

On Car Seats as Contraception

This paper finds that "laws mandating use of child car safety seats significantly reduce birth rates, as many cars cannot fit three child seats in the back seat." 

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”

Deming

The Minimum Wage’s Racially Discriminatory Roots

Jason Riley writes that the origin of minimum wage legislation is, in fact, racist (WSJ, Feb. 2021). “The federal government got involved in setting wage levels in the 1930s and did so at the urging of unions that excluded blacks as members. During debates in Congress, lawmakers complained openly about the ‘superabundance’ and ‘large aggregation of Negro labor’ and cited complaints by whites of black Southerners moving north to take jobs.

“As Congress increased the minimum wage periodically over the decades, these same arguments were put forward as a justification. When he was a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy backed minimum-wage hikes as a way of protecting New England industry. ‘Having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too—the wages of the white worker who has to compete,’ he lectured an NAACP official at a hearing in 1957. ‘And when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage—and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work—it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?’”

Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions

Our brains trick us (HBR, Feb. 2009)

Supply is Elastic

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/08/supply-is-elastic.html

Question

1. Did the people who planned the buy-back hope to increase the production of guns? 
2. Did the people who produced the 3-D guns response rationally? 
3. Do you think that the people who produced the 3-D guns sell them in gun shows or on the street? Why or why not?