The trouble with running on any deregulation campaign is that a lot of things people whine about have big differences between stated preferences and revealed preferences. One example is daylight savings, which everybody loves whines about in semiannual national ritual, but really it's no big deal and everybody just gets on with their lives.
TSA screening is also a good example. There are systems like PreCheck, Global Entry, and CLEAR that are relatively cheap and quick to get and which allow one to avoid a certain amount of the annoyance, frustration, and delay of the typical airport security experience. The cost of flights being what they are, these pay off even for people who travel by air only occasionally, and even when they place a relatively low value on the marginal gain in convenience.
And yet, in reality, only about 10 million people are signed up with PreCheck, there was hardly any rush to the program as it took six years to reach even that small fraction of the overall flying population, and while it's not quite clear, it seems that a large number of those who signed up only have it because their workplace sponsors it for them (as mine does for me), which is something the US government has been specifically lobbying its own agencies and a lot of large private employers to do for a long time, in an effort to bootstrap the popular adoption of these programs. Is there any better indicator for how strongly (i.e., weakly) people actually value avoiding some TSA security than that the government has to make constant, active efforts to encourage them to incur small costs to avoid it?
Of course one has to go through some kind of similar security experience to get in many government buildings and public events, and while people will also whine about it, there doesn't seem to be any significant pent-up demand of people who would go to these events but for the obnoxiousness of the security process. Maybe when it all just started, but now everyone has gotten used to it.
The point is that Bryan Caplan of all people should know perfectly well that you just can't take people's public complaining seriously and at face value in terms of accurately reflecting strong internal motivations that could be harnessed in some kind of electoral campaign messaging strategy.
"there is basically no evidence that the actual frisking plays a useful role. All the causal work in crime reduction is likely achieved simply through the officers’ presence."
Lol, this seems false, but if this were actually true and Yglesias really believed it, then it's probably the strongest argument *against* gun control that a progressive has penned in the last decade.
Unless you are assuming really crazy things like there would be no actual difference in the number of criminal-types carrying concealed handguns between a frisking vs. no-frisking scenario, then what you are saying is that neither the number of weapons nor the fact that people are carrying them in public in concealed ways has *any impact whatsoever* on crime levels or public safety. Even the NRA might not be so brazen.
If that was accepted as true by a court, then you couldn't even pass rational-basis review of any of the usual firearm restrictions, let alone the intermediate or strict scrutiny thresholds one usually has to meet to override Constitutional rights.
Arnold, there is no link to what Wright wrote but your comment confuses public goods with collective action. We all want to earn income and it may look like we all have a common purpose (as in a promised paradise with workers marching together to generate a pool of income to be distributed equally by the Great Leader). Free people, however, have the choice of working together to earn income or to compete among us to do it. We usually work together in small groups (or join large, old hierarchies) which compete among them. The challenge is to take advantage of many opportunities that require small or large groups of people working together (because of scale and specialization) but they fail to overcome a number of obstacles.
The problem of state capacity is not related to public goods but to collective action.
I thought Caplan was old enough to remember why we have things like the airport security "theater" he complains about. Richard Reed and his shoe bombs were more error than trial, but the next person to try that probably would have tested the mechanism before getting on a plane. Likewise REAL ID: several of the 9/11 hijackers had real driver's licenses, issued under fake names, and there's a collective action problem among states implementing a consistent, strong set of mechanisms to prevent that in the future.
It's easy to make a cost-benefit argument about those, but security threats leading to mass casualties are not amenable to casual cost analysis. Malicious actors usually learn how to game the system. Such arguments are not broadly convincing anyway because people revert to their lizard brains when faced with that kind of threat.
The US DHS did have a very poor implementation of security for the first decade or so, but it has gotten better, even if it is still worse than some European countries that I've traveled to. But it is notable that since 9/11, airline passengers have had more to worry about from Boeing, Russian surface-to-air missiles, or even mentally disturbed cabin crew than from hijackers.
The trouble with running on any deregulation campaign is that a lot of things people whine about have big differences between stated preferences and revealed preferences. One example is daylight savings, which everybody loves whines about in semiannual national ritual, but really it's no big deal and everybody just gets on with their lives.
TSA screening is also a good example. There are systems like PreCheck, Global Entry, and CLEAR that are relatively cheap and quick to get and which allow one to avoid a certain amount of the annoyance, frustration, and delay of the typical airport security experience. The cost of flights being what they are, these pay off even for people who travel by air only occasionally, and even when they place a relatively low value on the marginal gain in convenience.
And yet, in reality, only about 10 million people are signed up with PreCheck, there was hardly any rush to the program as it took six years to reach even that small fraction of the overall flying population, and while it's not quite clear, it seems that a large number of those who signed up only have it because their workplace sponsors it for them (as mine does for me), which is something the US government has been specifically lobbying its own agencies and a lot of large private employers to do for a long time, in an effort to bootstrap the popular adoption of these programs. Is there any better indicator for how strongly (i.e., weakly) people actually value avoiding some TSA security than that the government has to make constant, active efforts to encourage them to incur small costs to avoid it?
Of course one has to go through some kind of similar security experience to get in many government buildings and public events, and while people will also whine about it, there doesn't seem to be any significant pent-up demand of people who would go to these events but for the obnoxiousness of the security process. Maybe when it all just started, but now everyone has gotten used to it.
The point is that Bryan Caplan of all people should know perfectly well that you just can't take people's public complaining seriously and at face value in terms of accurately reflecting strong internal motivations that could be harnessed in some kind of electoral campaign messaging strategy.
"there is basically no evidence that the actual frisking plays a useful role. All the causal work in crime reduction is likely achieved simply through the officers’ presence."
Lol, this seems false, but if this were actually true and Yglesias really believed it, then it's probably the strongest argument *against* gun control that a progressive has penned in the last decade.
Unless you are assuming really crazy things like there would be no actual difference in the number of criminal-types carrying concealed handguns between a frisking vs. no-frisking scenario, then what you are saying is that neither the number of weapons nor the fact that people are carrying them in public in concealed ways has *any impact whatsoever* on crime levels or public safety. Even the NRA might not be so brazen.
If that was accepted as true by a court, then you couldn't even pass rational-basis review of any of the usual firearm restrictions, let alone the intermediate or strict scrutiny thresholds one usually has to meet to override Constitutional rights.
Wright, on "A higher vax rate, similarly, is good for those countries", is written in brutal ignorance.
He, and his ilk, likely have no idea of sound evidence regarding any such claims.
See e.g. https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/covid-friday-younger-and-younger , https://cafehayek.com/2021/11/some-covid-links-307.html , and
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=244422 .
Arnold, there is no link to what Wright wrote but your comment confuses public goods with collective action. We all want to earn income and it may look like we all have a common purpose (as in a promised paradise with workers marching together to generate a pool of income to be distributed equally by the Great Leader). Free people, however, have the choice of working together to earn income or to compete among us to do it. We usually work together in small groups (or join large, old hierarchies) which compete among them. The challenge is to take advantage of many opportunities that require small or large groups of people working together (because of scale and specialization) but they fail to overcome a number of obstacles.
The problem of state capacity is not related to public goods but to collective action.
I thought Caplan was old enough to remember why we have things like the airport security "theater" he complains about. Richard Reed and his shoe bombs were more error than trial, but the next person to try that probably would have tested the mechanism before getting on a plane. Likewise REAL ID: several of the 9/11 hijackers had real driver's licenses, issued under fake names, and there's a collective action problem among states implementing a consistent, strong set of mechanisms to prevent that in the future.
It's easy to make a cost-benefit argument about those, but security threats leading to mass casualties are not amenable to casual cost analysis. Malicious actors usually learn how to game the system. Such arguments are not broadly convincing anyway because people revert to their lizard brains when faced with that kind of threat.
The US DHS did have a very poor implementation of security for the first decade or so, but it has gotten better, even if it is still worse than some European countries that I've traveled to. But it is notable that since 9/11, airline passengers have had more to worry about from Boeing, Russian surface-to-air missiles, or even mentally disturbed cabin crew than from hijackers.