CHAPTER 1
We Were Only Trying to Help
©iStock.com/kumdinpitak
Some of the best ideas in historyânearly all of them, in factâsounded crazy at first. That said, a lot of crazy-sounding ideas truly are crazy. But how do you find out? One of the best things about having a blog is that youâve got a place to run your craziest ideas up the flagpole and see just how quickly they get shot down. Of all the posts weâve ever written, the first one in this chapter generated the quickest, loudest, angriest response.
If You Were a Terrorist, How Would You Attack?
(SDL)
The TSA recently announced that most airplane carry-on restrictions will stay in place for now, although the ban has now been lifted on cigarette lighters. While it seems crazy to keep people from bringing toothpaste, deodorant, or water through security, it didnât seem so strange to ban lighters. I wonder whether the lighter manufacturers were lobbying for or against this rule change. On the one hand, having twenty-two thousand lighters confiscated per day would seem good for business; on the other hand, maybe fewer people will buy lighters if they canât travel with them.
Hearing about these rules got me thinking about what I would do to maximize terror if I were a terrorist with limited resources. Iâd start by thinking about what really inspires fear. One thing that scares people is the thought that they could be a victim of an attack. With that in mind, Iâd want to do something that everybody thinks might be directed at them, even if the individual probability of harm is very low.
Humans tend to overestimate small probabilities, so the fear generated by an act of terrorism is greatly disproportionate to the actual risk.
Also, Iâd want to create the feeling that an army of terrorists exists, which Iâd accomplish by pulling off multiple attacks at once, and then following them up with more shortly thereafter.
Third, unless terrorists always insist on suicide missions (which I canât imagine they would), it would be optimal to hatch a plan in which your terrorists arenât killed or caught in the act, if possible.
Fourth, I think it makes sense to try to stop commerce, since a commerce breakdown gives people more free time to think about how scared they are.
Fifth, if you really want to impose pain on the U.S., the act has to be something that prompts the government to pass a bundle of very costly laws that stay in place long after they have served their purpose (assuming they had a purpose in the first place).
My general view of the world is that simpler is better. My guess is that this thinking applies to terrorism as well. In that spirit, the best terrorist plan I have heard is one that my father thought up after the D.C. snipers created havoc in 2002. The basic idea is to arm twenty terrorists with rifles and cars, and arrange to have them begin shooting randomly at pre-set times all across the country. Big cities, little cities, suburbs, etc. Have them move around a lot. No one will know when and where the next attack will be. The chaos would be unbelievable, especially considering how few resources it would require of the terrorists. It would also be extremely hard to catch these guys. The damage wouldnât be as extreme as detonating a nuclear bomb in New York City, of course, but it sure would be a lot easier to obtain a handful of guns than a nuclear weapon.
Iâm sure many readers have far better ideas. I would love to hear them. Consider that posting them on this blog could be a form of public service: I presume that a lot more folks who oppose and fight terror read this blog than actual terrorists. So by getting these ideas out in the open, it gives terror fighters a chance to consider and plan for these scenarios before they occur.
This post was published on August 8, 2007, the day the Freakonomics blog took up residence on The New York Timesâs website. That same day, in an interview with The New York Observer, Dubner was asked to explain why Freakonomics was the first outside blog that the Times had decided to publish. His answer reflected the fact that he used to work at the newspaper and knew well its standards and mores: âThey know Iâm not going to issue some sort of fatwa on the blog.â As it turns out, Levittâs post soliciting ideas for a terrorist strike was considered exactly that. It drew so much heated response that the Times shut down the comments section after a few hundred comments. Here is a typical one: âYou have got be kidding me. Ideas for terrorists? Think you are being cute? Clever? You are an idiot.â This led Levitt to try again, the following day:
1Terrorism, Part II
(SDL)
On the very first day that our blog was hosted by The New York Times, I wrote a post that generated the most hate mail Iâve gotten since the abortion-crime story first broke almost a decade ago. The people e-mailing me canât decide whether I am a moron, a traitor, or both. Let me try again.
A lot of the angry responses make me wonder what everyday Americans think terrorists do all day. My guess is that they brainstorm ideas for terrorist plots. And you have to believe that terrorists are total idiots if it never occurred to them after the Washington, D.C., sniper shootings that maybe a sniper plot wasnât a bad idea.
The point is this: there is a virtually infinite array of incredibly simple strategies available to terrorists. The fact that it has been six years since the last major terrorist attack in the United States suggests either that the terrorists are incompetent, or that perhaps their goal isnât really to generate terror. (A separate factor is the prevention efforts by law enforcement and the government; Iâll address that later.)
Many of the angry e-mails I received demanded that I write a post explaining how we stop terrorists. But the obvious answer is a disappointing one: if terrorists want to engage in low-grade, low-tech terror, we are powerless to stop it.
That is the situation in Iraq right now, and, to a lesser degree, in Israel. That was also more or less the situation with the IRA a while back.
So what can we do? Like the British and Israelis have done, if faced with this situation, Americans would figure out how to live with it. The actual cost of this low-grade terrorism in terms of human lives is relatively small, compared to other causes of death like motor-vehicle crashes, heart attacks, homicide, and suicide. It is the fear that imposes the real cost.
But just as people in countries with runaway inflation learn relatively quickly to live with it, the same happens with terrorism. The actual risk of dying from an attack while riding a bus in Israel is lowâand so, 9as Gary Becker and Yona Rubinstein have shown, people who have a lot of experience riding Israeli buses donât respond much to the threat of bombings. Similarly, there is little wage premium for being a bus driver in Israel.
Beyond this, I think there are a few more prospective things we can do. If the threat is from abroad, then we can do a good job screening risky people from entering the country. That, too, is obvious. Perhaps less obvious is that we can do a good job following potential risks after they enter the country. If someone enters on a student visa and isnât enrolled in school, for instance, he is worth keeping under close surveillance.
Another option is one the British have used: putting cameras everywhere. This is very anti-American, so it probably would never fly here. I also am not sure it is a good investment. But the recent terrorist attacks in the U.K. suggest that these cameras are at least useful after the fact in identifying the perpetrators.
10The work of my University of Chicago colleague Robert Pape suggests that the strongest predictor of terrorist acts is the occupation of a groupâs territory. From that perspective, having American troops in Iraq is probably not helping to reduce terrorismâalthough it may be serving other purposes.
Ultimately, though, it strikes me that there are two possible interpretations of our current situation vis-Ă -vis terrorism.
One view is this: the main reason we arenât currently being decimated by terrorists is that the governmentâs anti-terror efforts have been successful.
The alternative interpretation is that the terror risk just isnât that high and we are greatly overspending on fighting it, or at least appearing to fight it. For most government officials, there is much more pressure to look like you are trying to stop terrorism than there is to actually stop it. The head of the TSA canât be blamed if a plane gets shot down by a shoulder-launched missile, but he is in serious trouble if a tube of explosive toothpaste takes down a plane. Consequently, we put much more effort into the toothpaste even though it is probably a much less important threat.
Likewise, an individual at the CIA isnât in trouble if a terrorist attack happens; he or she is only in trouble if there is no written report that details the possibility of such an attack, which someone else should have followed up on, but never did because there are so many such reports written.
My guess is that the second scenarioâthe terrorism threat just isnât that greatâis the more likely one. Which, if you think about it, is an optimistic view of the world. But that probably still makes me a moron, a traitor, or both.
2How About a âWar on Taxesâ?
(SJD)
David Cay Johnston, who does an incredible job covering U.S. tax policy and other business issues for The New York Times, reports that the IRS is outsourcing the collection of back taxes to third parties, a.k.a. collection agencies. âThe private debt collection program is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years,â he writes, âwith the collection agencies keeping about $330 million of that, or 22 to 24 cents on the dollar.â
Maybe that seems like too big a cut to surrender. And maybe people will be worried about the collection agencies having access to their financial records. But whatâs most striking to me is that the IRS knows who owes the money and knows where to find it, but because it is understaffed cannot afford to collect it. So it has to hire someone else to do it, at a stiff price.
The IRS admits that external collection is far more expensive than internal collection. Former commissioner Charles O. Rossotti once told Congress that if the IRS hired more agents, it âcould collect more than $9 billion each year and spend only $296 millionâor about three cents on the dollarâto do so,â Johnston writes.
Even if Rossotti was exaggerating by a factor of five, the government would still be getting a better deal by hiring more agents than by contracting to a third party that takes a 22 percent cut. But Congress, which oversees the IRS budget, is famously reluctant to give the agency more resources to do its job. 11We touched on this subject in a Times column of our own:
A main task of any IRS commissioner . . . is to beg Congress and the White House for resources. For all the obvious appeal of having the IRS collect every dollar owed to the government, it is just as obviously unappealing for most politicians to advocate a more vigorous IRS. Michael Dukakis tried this during his 1988 presidential campaign, andâwell, it didnât work.
Left to enforce a tax code no one likes upon a public that knows it can practically cheat at will, the IRS does its best to fiddle around the edges.
Why does Congress act as it does? Maybe our congressmen are a bunch of history buffs so imbued with the spirit of our republic that they remember the Boston Tea Party too well and are scared of how the populace might revolt if they ramp up tax enforcement. But keep in mind that we are talking about tax enforcement here, which is the IRSâs job, and not tax law, which is Congressâs responsibility. In other words, Congress is happy to set the tax rates that it does; but it doesnât want to be seen as giving too much comfort to the bad cops who have to go out and collect those tax dollars.
So maybe they need to relabel their effort to get all the tax money that is owed. Since Congress approves so much money for the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, maybe itâs time for them to launch a War on Taxesâwell, really, a War on Tax Cheats. What if they could demonize the tax cheats so thoroughly, emphasizing that the âtax gapâ (the difference between taxes owed and money collected) is about the size of the federal deficit: Would that make it more politically palatable to give the IRS the resources to collect the money that is owed? Maybe they could put pictures of tax cheats on milk cartons, on flyers at the post office, even on Americaâs Most Wanted. Would that do the trick? Would a properly managed War on Tax Cheats fix the problem?
For now, weâll have to settle for the IRS turning over the job to collection agencies who will collect some money but not nearly as much as is owed. Which means a lot of moneyâa lot of tax money, that is, collected from the people who donât cheatâcontinuing to go down the drain.
3If Public Libraries Didnât Exist, Could You Start One Today?
(SJD)
Raise your hand if you...