Do you know why people do those things? To kill time. They want time to pass quickly. They want the time to go away as “fast” as possible. Procrustus has a point that not all time is equal. Some of it, like 2 a.m., is valuable to people. Some is not. Airport time is not. You can’t take airport time and multiply it by the “2 a.m. wage” to get the cost of the program. You have to multiply it by “airport wage,” which is practically zero, since people have so much time that they’ll try to kill it by shopping, talking on the phone or reading.
After all, it’s not like people go to the airport so they can finally have time to finish their book or buy a neck pillow.
You’ve always struck me as a kind of anti-work programs sort, so I was a bit surprised you asked this question. As someone a bit on the fence, I think working from the hypothesis that a stimulative jobs program is necessary, the cost is the opportunity cost of what else you could get by spending the same $X on the same Y persons.
You could
Have terrific security theater in airports without increasing wait times.
Station round the clock personnel to scare tigers away from municipal parking lots everywhere.
Individually tutor children.
Digitize and publish government records.
There’s quite a bit of variance in the capabilities of TSA employees so I’ve kept my musings aimed at the LCD.
Agreed in broad strokes. $10 billion sounds very high. A cursory search gave me the figure of 800 million passengers per year. I think I’m a bit of a skinflint, and I’d be willing to pay $1 - $2 to skip the average TSA time tax of 18 minutes. I would estimate the annual waiting in line cost to be around $1 billion.
Then there are the additional costs - we’re missing out on protecting our civil servants from tiger attacks - I’d value that at $200k. We’re also subjecting ourselves to unnecessary pat downs - let’s put that cost at $500 billion. We’re also putting unnecessary wear on our footwear and belts - $4 million. On top of that, we’re unnecessarily dumping liquids of various sorts - $400 million.
This has to be weighed against the security benefits of TSA. I’m not convinced that there are any. The more pro-active law enforcement and intelligence agencies have a strong argument for foiling attacks, disrupting AQ, etc. As for TSA, I don’t believe that they have the capabilities to prevent the leaking of a success story, and I have heard no success stories that indicate they are doing anything of value.
Does that assume that those 19.5 minutes would be spent working or spending money, as opposed to, say, sleeping in because you don’t have to get to the airport so damn early?
That wouldn’t matter. Sleeping in is still worth some amount of money. But my argument, though, is that you won’t get to sleep in (or work or play a game). You’ll just have more time to kill on the other side.
I am anti-work-program, but erislover said it’s a cost when it’s a benefit. I never said it was worth it. If you look at the budget of the TSA, and you want to add all the time costs and such, you also have to subtract the fact that you’re employing people and all the other benefits.
Then we’re in agreement.
Surely you jest. $500 billion?! More like $10. Not $10 billion, but $10.
The TSA is just a general security force. They don’t just thwart terrorists. They also keep thousands of guns off of planes, for instance. So now you can no longer say you’ve never heard of a success story. You’ll stop posting that from now on, won’t you?
Here is the point: people value not standing in line. We can assign a dollar value as a measure of that. Again you are obsessed, pointlessly, with the idea that people would be banging out widgets but for the nasty TSA. No one has said so. I have explained the idea. When that idea was said to be meaningless by another poster, I gave an actual example of people valuing not standing in line with real dollars. At this point, your objections are simply “nuh-uh!”
Having interacted with you before, I was quite flabbergasted by the idea that creating an entire industry from whole cloth, funded by tax money, wouldn’t be a cost. If I had to pick random dopers that would agree with the proposition that government programs are costs, one would be you. Well, they are a cost because they are a tax-dollar funded industry created from whole cloth. At best they would be an economically neutral transfer but that is being extremely charitable to the organization.
Fascinating hypothesis. I am not sure Dunkin Donuts, Legal Seafood, Max and Erma’s, A&W, Burger King, Borders, et al would agree with your position on the matter. I am not sure that all the business people doing work on their laptops would agree with your position on the matter. I am not sure all the mothers with their children would agree with your position on the matter. In short, I am not sure anyone at all believes time spent at the airport is actually time wasted, except time spent standing in a line.
The analysis starts simply: would you rather be doing something than standing in a line? If the answer to that question is “yes”, then TSA has imposed a cost and it is reasonable to attempt to measure that cost. You are free to answer “no” and have absolutely no one in the world believe you.
In a sense I jest. We’re putting a price tag on intangibles. This is the one issue where I wear rose colored glasses - I think that increasing risk aversion is a change for the worse in the general character of the nation that can cause us to sacrifice too much.
I’ll admit that this is an issue I’m not entirely consistent with. Everyone, myself included, will have different issues for which they’ll cry ‘Freedom!’ above the cries of bald eagles. Overboard security patdowns is one of mine. But I’m okay with seat belts, OCR and lookup of license plates, and background checks for gun purchases. Go figure.
What was the volume of guns on the nation’s air routes prior to Nov 19, 2001? I wasn’t a frequent flier at the time, but I don’t believe that it was an epidemic. TSA is an order of magnitude increase in the resources devoted to general security for public aviation. I don’t think that there is room for an order of magnitude safety improvement over the previous system.
Yes, and that dollar value is extremely low. As in, less than $1 billion.
You’re talking about a net cost. I’m talking about a gross cost. curioushat suggested that one of the benefits of the TSA was the jobs, income, and taxes that we get from employing people. You said “that’s a cost, not a benefit,” as in jobs, income, and taxes are costs. That makes no sense, no matter what the rest of the calculation turns out to be.
The businesses in the airport survive solely because people have time to kill and they’re willing to spend money to pass the time. Mothers with kids, I’ll give you, but businessmen with laptops have nothing but time. They’ve got nothing to do but sit in a flying tin can and wait for the hours to pass. They’ve got plenty of time to work there. Next time you’re at the airport, ask a random passenger if they wish the plane would hold off for a minute because they’ve got something really important to do on their laptop, or if they wish the plane were ready to go right that minute. You’ll never hear the first option.
Ergo, flyers are just killing time 'til the plane’s ready.
No, the question to ask is: Can you do anything you’d rather be doing, other than standing in line? The answer to that is “no,” because all the things you’d rather be doing are at home or at work or in bed or…anywhere but the airport. No one goes “I sure hope I get through security quickly so I can get to Max&Erma’s before the flight.” It doesn’t matter how short the security line is, you’ll still have to be at the airport an hour before the flight, as the limiting factor is the plane, not the security.
So say what you want about whether the TSA is worth it or not. But don’t add $10 billion to the “against” side because people have to wait.
Sure there is a cost. People hate standing in line, no question. It is not, however, “reasonable to attempt to measure that cost.” Can’t be done in a meaningful way. We can all just agree there is some cost and move on. Sure, it’s fun to say we’re wasting xx billion of dollars standing in line, but the analysis seems more philosophical than economic.
The question of the economic benefit of the TSA providing all the jobs, buying equipment, etc is actually an interesting one.
The TSA is basically a jobs program hidden as a half-assed security system. I find a more interesting question than the efficacy of the TSA (which, at best, is limited) is (1) whether or not those stimulative dollars would be better spent elsewhere in the government/economy and (2) whether or not it would be politically feasible for the government to spend that money to create and maintain jobs in other areas.
We use the calculated costs of delays as a method of making informed decisions. Say a civil engineer is analysing a new highway proposal. If its benefits outweighs its costs, he will recommend building it to City Hall. He puts a price on the time people spend in traffic to help calculate the benefits.
This has been done at least as long as we have had highways. Why is that wrong?
Why should we not use the same method to calculate the net benefits of the TSA?
Well I am aware of the individual who cited the $10 billion figure and if he said it I feel reasonably sure that he has good reasons for it, even if I don’t know them. What’s your calculation?
What? Why would you change the context of a sentence, and then claim that in your new fantasy context the statement makes no sense? We’re talking about the TSA. We’re not talking about jobs in general. Without claims that we’re addressing a genuine market failure with the TSA, the best we could possibly hope for is that the entire TSA is a neutral transfer from tax payers to TSA employees. Then we could assess the rest of the matter without regard to these items, such as weighing the remaining benefits (decreased planes slammed into buildings) with the remaining costs (increased hassle to all airport employees, employers, and customers).
I suppose one could make the argument that we’re stimulating aggregate demand with the TSA so there is some multiplier effect going on which we’re not accounting for. Is that your position?
So then you agree that there is some way to associate time with money in various contexts. Excellent.
Unless your position is that “they would be just as happy standing in line the whole time as they would otherwise” then the increased wait time is a real cost and we can attempt to measure it. The rest of your fluff is just bringing up non-monetary things people value which is not in dispute as most costs and benefits are non-monetary. Is your position that these other activities are as valuable as standing in line, so that airport customers are acting indifferently to their activities at an airport?
That question is always true. Given unlimited means to satisfy our wants and needs, people would probably not engage in almost any of the behavior they do (rats with electrodes for instance). But since that has no relationship at all to reality, I would tend to dismiss it and simply ask whether standing in line at an airport has a cost.
I do. Are you kidding? If the lines are short it is awesome because I can smoke more cigarettes, read a book, grab a leisurely dinner instead of wolfing down a cinnabun, etc. Given the rapidity with which new security lines fill up when they open, I’d guess plenty of people have other things to do, even though their choices are constrained by the fact that they are at an airport.
It is not a question of how much time there is in the abstract. It is how that time is spent.
Can you please explain how anyone could possibly decide whether paying to get ahead of the line in my link was worth it, if it cannot be done in a meaningful way?
Is this really that difficult for you. My objection IS THAT THEY ASSUME PEOPLE WOULD BE BANGING OUT WIDGETS! That’s how you get numbers like $10 billion dollars for making people wait an extra 20 minutes. I understand time has a value. I think that was clear form the first post. My objection is going, well since the average working hour earns person $x per hour, let’s add up all the time and multiply it by the number of people and adjust a tiny bit. That’s complete bullshit, and you know it.
It’s a common scare tactic to attempt to association an exorbitant cost to an issue, when the REAL costs are significantly lower. Think about it this way. What is the cost of an extra hour of sleep to you? Let’s say you said it’s worth $10 to you. Now let’s say you decided to get that extra hour of sleep by going to bed earlier each night. Would it be fair to say that you new sleep habits cost you $3650/year? Now what if I figured that your salary works out to $50/hour. Would it be fair to say that extra hour of sleep costs you $18250/year? Yes, we all recognize your time has value, but calculating that based on what you theoretically might pay for something, or based on theoretical maximum lost income, is foolish.
Or here’s another example. Let’s just say I can microwave a hot pocket for 3 minutes, or put it in the oven for 20 minutes. Say I sell I 20 million hot pockets, and half of them are cooked in the oven. Let’s also add that the average person’s hourly wage is $20/hour. Would it be fair to say oven cooking of hot pockets costs society nearly $57 million dollars/year?
Nobody has said that the time loss has NO value. What I, and some others, have said is that the calculation is wildly off the mark because they selectively treat waiting time as income-earning time. Income earning time is actually valuable, but it’s often not fungible or elastic. That’s using crude math to say waiting 20 minutes costs society X amount is a terrible way to make a point that the TSA is a bloated bureaucracy. Re-read my first post on the matter:
[QUOTE=Brickbacon]
I hate analysis like this because it presumes every one’s time corresponds to a loss in income or income earning opportunity.
[/QUOTE]
I am not saying there is no cost. My critique is more one of journalistic innumeracy and lack of logical reasoning. Even if you accept that they are using cost in a strict economic sense, it’s incredibly misleading and sloppy journalism.
I agree. The problem is, how do I put a number on that cost? The security bypass thing may give us a crude estimate of that number, but I assure you it will be nowhere close to $10 billion. More importantly, the TSA does actually provide some benefit, so even if you managed to collect a large amount of money, you need to offset that with the benefits people receive. That said, I think we are, and have always been, largely in agreement on the broad strokes here. What I object to is how people total the costs in cases like this in order to advance a specious argument.
Some people would pay a lot. Some people would pay nothing and wait longer in line. You can assign the value for you, me, or the other guy, but you can’t assign a value (even an average value) for everyone. [well, you can. But you have to then admit it’s an arbitrary number] Even the same people wouldn’t value their time the same on different trips. There are too many variables (how early am I, how hungry am I, how long is the line, how poor or rich am I feeling right now, etc).
By sleeping an extra hour, I am forgoing other opportunities, like playing video games, watching television, going on dates, and yes, maybe even working. How I value those things will indeed have a possible measure in dollar terms by analyzing my choices in contexts where they actually do have dollar terms. It is an imperfect measure, because price is not a direct measure of value. If I buy a video game, all you can know for sure is that it was at least a matter of indifference whether I held on to $50 or bought a game. But it is a way to begin to quantify choices.
Perhaps. I have never actually heard people calculate like this directly, but it doesn’t strike me as an absolutely horrible measure.
Suppose I accept your principle that it is foolish. Can you please explain how I would make any decision at all between two mutually exclusive alternatives?
No, they express it in dollars. For instance, I like sourdough bread. I give the grocery store money for a loaf of it. If I am to understand you, I cannot put a dollar value on my preference for bread because bread isn’t money and you don’t get paid to eat bread. That is clearly preposterous because it is equivalent to the position that pricing mechanisms are impossible. I suppose you could take such a position, maybe you could found some new non-market form of social organization around this principle, but my guess is that you aren’t willing to take such an extreme position and have instead simply failed to realize that your criticism makes no sense.
On the contrary, I think your position has no logical reasoning whatsoever because it would call pricing in general into question. It would leave people incapable of comparing choices.
I think that is an excellent question. For instance, when you desire both a microwave and a rice cooker, but only enough money to buy one of them. How do you decide? (This is rhetorical.) Suppose you have a wizard which makes these decisions for you, and you have arrived at your decision, one way or the other. Now someone comes along and offers you a sum of money to change your mind and buy the other product. Is it your position that this cannot happen because you’ve already made up your mind, and besides, cooking rice and microwaving hot pockets aren’t your job so there’s no way to use dollars to quantify the decision? (This is not rhetorical.)
In my opinion, my guess is that this is actually a gross underestimate because there are likely many costs to having the TSA in existence that were not included in the measurement, such as the deleterious effects of increased taxes or national debt needed to create the TSA (though maybe that was estimated as well). But since these figures are usually used to convince people who don’t think the cost is large, we tend to make simplifying assumptions in our opponents’ benefit (like: the cost of the TSA itself is just a neutral transfer and can be discounted as no net benefit or cost).
Suppose I make $25/hour. Presumably it is doing something I don’t want to be doing, which is why someone has to give me money to do it. (Yeah, yeah, “do what you love”…) Then we can use this salary as a good estimate of “what it costs to get people to do things they don’t want to do.” As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, you could do a lot worse. For instance, you could say, “You can’t do anything at all, but if you did, it would be meaningless, and if it weren’t, it surely wouldn’t be ten billion dollars,” which doesn’t strike me as presenting anything we could use to decide anything.
I don’t see why not. By definition, the average hourly wage is the average amount you have to pay people to do something they’d generally rather not be doing – what better measurement do we have?
Edit: GMTA…
Edit: If anything, using wages as a guesstimate may lowball the results – working at a job has benefits (e.g. the possibility of getting a better job if your performance gives a good impression) that are absent for other annoying activities such as standing in line.
but it’s not a trade off between doing something you don’t enjoy (waiting in line) and something you do enjoy (e.g., Sex). It’s a trade off between something you don’t enjoy (waiting in line) and something else you don’t particularly like either (killing time at the airport). Believe me, if you had to pay me to stand in line, you’d have to pay me almost as much to sit at the gate waiting to board the plane. This difference is what I suggest cannot be accurately measured. There are tons of reasons to revamp airport security, but the allegation that 19 minutes in the TSA line is costing society $10 billion is not one of them.
No, not “do something,” but “do their job,” which is completely different than standing in line for a security check. Time doesn’t translate directly into money because it matters what you’re doing with the time, and it matters what else you could be doing. As I said earlier, once you total up the wait time for every passenger, you have to multiply it by an airport wage…i.e., the opportunity cost of standing in line. And as I’ve said, that wage is very, very low because there’s not much to do at an airport that people actually like doing.
So you can’t say “I could either stand in line for 20 minutes or sleep in.” You have to say “I could either stand in line for 20 minutes or read my book,” or “I could either stand in line for 20 minutes or choke down a Cinnabon.” Book-reading, Cinnabon-eating, and laptop-working are all very low in value. So the overall cost of the TSA is very low as well.
Consider this- what if after you went through security, I offered you $5 to go through another 20 minutes of screening. Would you take it? I sure as hell would, and I make a lot more than $15/hr. Why? Because I’m giving up 20 minutes of airport time for $5. Because airport time is near-worthless, that’s a good deal. And I think most agree with me.
Well, that’s a matter of degree, isn’t it? Obviously if I could I’d just have sex and eat ice cream and peanut butter all day. Do you think this is really a sound basis for judging real world costs? I don’t.
I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you are indifferent to standing in line. I think if someone paid you money to stand in line, and someone else paid you money to sit down, you would generally choose to sit down, so much that they could offer you much less to sit than to stand. I think if someone paid you to stand in line, and someone else offered to stand in line for you while you go do whatever, that you’d be willing to offer them at least some of the money you’re hypothetically receiving for it. It’s possible you just love standing in line, and there’s no way I can demonstrate that your preferences are contrary to what you claim. But I am extremely incredulous.
Frankly, if you dispute this kind of measure I cannot imagine what kind you’d consider acceptable. But I’m willing to hear any proposal you have. Feel free to pick a simple example like buying food at a grocery store instead of a massive government program. I think grocery stores are a good example, actually. You know why they have multiple registers? Because people don’t like standing in lines. At least, that’d be my assessment. If they only ever have one register, then people will simply choose to shop somewhere else, all else equal, because they don’t like standing in lines. The store could imperfectly measure this by announcing in advance they will have just one register open on a specific date (and have it open until all customers are served) and then comparing receipts. You could argue that this is also an imperfect measure but all measures are imperfect so I don’t know how that really affects the issue. But I am interested to hear what analysis you’d bring to bear on the matter.
