How serious a problem is terrorism? Krueger’s table of relative risks shows that the answer is “not very.” An American’s lifetime risk of being killed by a terrorist, calculates Krueger, is 1:69,000. Compare that to the 1:88 chance of being killed in a motor vehicle accident and the even more serious 1:7 risk of dying from cancer and 1:4 risk of dying from heart disease. Based on other risks he shows in his table, he writes, “In 2005 the average American’s chance of being killed by a terrorist was much less than his or her chance of being killed by lightning or in an airplane crash.”
People often respond to this by pointing out that, with terrorism, someone is actively trying to kill others, whereas with the other risks fatalities “just happen.” While that certainly should affect our moral evaluation—lightning is amoral, while a terrorist is virtually certain to be immoral—it should not affect one’s evaluation of relative risks. Krueger doesn’t address this response, probably because he sees it as the red herring that it is. But his table of risks implicitly answers the argument. He shows that an American’s lifetime probability of being murdered is 1:240, which is 287.5 times the probability of being killed by a terrorist. In both cases, the killing is intentional.
This is from David R. Henderson, “Perspective on the Terrorist Threat,” Regulation, Fall 2018. It’s my review of Alan Krueger’s What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism.
Another excerpt:
He [Krueger] never suggests that government officials be fined or even fired for misreporting facts. But he doesn’t have the same tolerance for private-sector actors. He writes, “Perhaps the FCC could keep track of inaccuracies in reporting on terrorism and fine media outlets if they repeatedly make mistakes.” It is certainly true that the media hype terrorism and that that has bad effects. But his confidence in proposing that a government agency be given the power to fine those who are exercising their freedom of speech is breathtaking.
Read the whole thing. To get to it, you need to scroll down a good bit.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Sep 15 2018 at 11:41am
This is exactly the type of thing that Paul Slovik and co-workers studied in the early 1980s. The public miscontrues low-risk high-dread things and gets the probabilities very wrong. Even so, policy makers often don’t think outside the box when trying to figure out where weak links are in trying to combat terrorist events. IIRC, the French were seriously considering a mid-air capture of a jetliner and crashing it into the Eiffel Tower well in advance of what happened in the US on 9/11. In retrospect, securing the pilot’s cabin on an airliner is something easy to do and out of the box thinking would have identified it before the catastrophe.
Alan Goldhammer
Sep 15 2018 at 12:54pm
I was too quick and misspelled Paul Slovic. For those that might be interested here is one of the early papers on risk perception
Ben Kennedy
Sep 15 2018 at 11:47am
“Terrorism risk” is not simply “likelihood of getting personally killed”. We are a social species, and attacks on institutions (terrorism fits the bill here) are inherently scarier than lightning strikes. Clearly 9/11 had a bigger emotional impact that merely the raw death toll.
Additionally, comparing odds of terrorism deaths in a given year past calendar year minimizes what happened in national-level, traumatic years like 2001. I don’t think people who are concerned about terrorism are so innumerate as to be concerned about being personally killed. I think they are concerned about things like, well, 2001.
I do like Krueger’s work on analyzing the roots of terrorism – very helpful.
Jon Murphy
Sep 15 2018 at 1:22pm
If they’re concerned about 9/11, then the point is made even stronger. There has only been one 9/11.
Ben Kennedy
Sep 15 2018 at 1:36pm
One could easily counter-argue that there hasn’t been a second 9/11 because increased vigilance has thwarted similar plots.
Jon Murphy
Sep 15 2018 at 2:02pm
You could argue that, but it wouldn’t be supported by evidence
Alan Goldhammer
Sep 16 2018 at 8:58am
Since a lot of ‘foiled’ plots are likely to be classified information, we really have no way of knowing how well ‘increased vigilance’ is working.
Jon Murphy
Sep 16 2018 at 10:32am
Alan-
All the more reason to be doubtful of claims that they are working. You’d need evidence.
David Henderson
Sep 15 2018 at 1:34pm
I’m not clear how 9/11 was an attack on institutions. I know that George W. Bush said, within hours, that it was an attack on our freedom, but we’ve never had much evidence to confirm that. Or maybe I misunderstand you. What do you mean by “institutions?”
Ben Kennedy
Sep 15 2018 at 1:53pm
I don’t think the targets were chosen randomly – they chose symbols of American financial power (the WTC) and military power (the Pentagon). They were deliberate attacks against the American social order. I fully agree that the motives behind the attacks were not “hating freedom”, OBL’s list of grievances was long and detailed. But I think it’s clear that it was an attack on the collective known as “America”, which is what I mean by saying an “attack on institutions” – as opposed to a random mugging, which is an attack on an individual. Our tribal brains processes them pretty differently
Jon Murphy
Sep 15 2018 at 4:40pm
I guess I don’t see why talking about an attack on an institution necessarily changes the outcome here, why Prof. Henderson’s point is invalid (or less valid) in a 9/11-style attack versus a random mugging.
Ben Kennedy
Sep 15 2018 at 10:57pm
Because Libertarians routinely skip the whole “understand what other people are thinking” portion of a debate before launching into arguments against them. And with this issue, as I pointed out above, the lack of terrorism deaths can be construed as evidence that massive anti-terrorism response are justified.
This is why Krueger’s work on what motivates terrorism is very useful. You can’t go to someone who believes in the collective known as the USA and say “you’re more likely to die from cancer in any year, so you are foolish to fear terrorism – checkmate, innumerate!”. That’s not an effective argument. It looks a lot more like preaching to the choir, or as Arnold Kling describes much political speech, closing the minds of people who agree with you rather than opening the minds of people who don’t. What you can do is, contra Bush II, point out that the real roots of terrorism are a meddlesome US foreign policy, and persuade them the merits of non-interventionism
Jon Murphy
Sep 16 2018 at 10:31am
Ben-
You’re making two separate claims and conflating the two.
It’s not obvious that the numeracy argument does not hold for terrorism just because terrorism is an attack on an institution. It may change the threshold a little bit, but that’s it.
Understanding the root cause of terrorism is vital, but has nothing to do with the numeracy point.
One final point: the lack of terrorism deaths cannot, without more evidence, be construed as an argument that the efforts are working. That’s a spurious correlation. It’s akin to me saying I am the cause of Patriots victories because they win every game I watch. You need evidence to support your claim.
Ben Kennedy
Sep 16 2018 at 11:53am
“It’s not obvious that the numeracy argument does not hold for terrorism just because terrorism is an attack on an institution.”
It’s because the risk assessments are trying to compare quantities with different units – call them “village-threat” and “individual-threat”. This is really hard for a lot of Libertarians to get, because they don’t personally experience the concept of the national collective, and even go out of their way to talk about how the concept is illegitimate and/or immoral. To drive the point home, look at the voluntary behavior of soldiers – they dramatically increase their individual-threat risk by joining the military and deploying to war zones, for the purported reason to reduce the village-threat risk. This shows that “personal death risk” is pretty irrelevant as people evaluate their relative tolerance of these kinds of events. In non-soldiers, this manifests in the almost universal respect and acclaim for people that risk their own lives on behalf of general society (soldiers, first responders, etc)
Weir
Sep 16 2018 at 5:56am
Krueger’s lifetime risk of being killed by the US military is not very high. But it’s not much of an argument against Krueger’s position to point out that he is not personally likely to be killed by an American Hellfire missile.
That’s because his objection to American foreign policy is not based on some failure to correctly assess the likelihood of his being killed by a Marine or a Navy SEAL. He’s not talking about himself.
Even if Krueger got an iron-clad guarantee from the US military that he was personally safe from any future American military action, his objection would remain, wouldn’t it? Because his objection isn’t to the threat that the US military poses to him. His objection to American foreign policy is on a philosophical level. It’s to do with beliefs, not his own physical safety.
If you tell Krueger that he’s more likely to die of cancer than of any American military action he’s not going to feel like he needs to redraft his book. He’d say that his critics are missing the point.
Which they are. They’re talking past him. They’re changing the subject and knocking over a strawman. They’re failing to imagine the true nature of Krueger’s objection, which is a moral and philosophical objection to American policy, and not some fearful miscalculation of the anti-terrorist threat to his personal safety. Whether he is himself likely to be killed by an American soldier is not the source of his objection. He’s motivated by something different. He’s not afraid of personally coming to harm in the next anti-terrorist event. His disapproval has a different source.
David Henderson
Sep 16 2018 at 10:37am
You may be right about Krueger’s objection to foreign policy, but you may be wrong also. Nowhere in the book does he address his own beliefs about foreign policy.
Weir
Sep 17 2018 at 5:56pm
This is what I meant above about talking past each other.
My hope was that by talking about “Krueger’s position” instead of “Henderson’s” you’d be more likely to think about the substance of the argument I’m making. Maybe even reconsider your assumption that people are personally frightened about their own chances of getting killed by a machete-wielding terrorist. That’s the assumption you’re working from, and it’s silly.
I could rephrase the argument with a cartoon moose. The lifetime risk to Bullwinkle from this Hellfire missile or that machete is not important to him. It’s not the issue. It’s not the point. It’s not what he has in mind when he voices a strongly critical view of terrorism or of anti-terrorism.
You and me and Bullwinkle all have this in common. Any one of us might slip in the bathtub, aged 74. But we’re not thinking about our own likely fates when we voice our opinions about George W. Bush or Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden, as it happens, had a strongly critical opinion of what he called “man made law.” What do you believe he meant by that?
BC
Sep 16 2018 at 4:11pm
The number of people that die from intrusive government surveillance may be very small (zero?), but that doesn’t mean that warrantless surveillance is not a serious problem.
In DH’s review, he enumerates some of Krueger’s findings. International terrorists generally come from illiberal countries and tend to attack wealthy liberal countries. Also, terrorists tend to attack occupying countries but are not necessarily from the occupied countries themselves, i.e., terrorists themselves are often intervening in another country’s affairs. So, terrorists are substate organizations from illiberal countries that intervene in other countries’ affairs by attacking wealthy liberal countries. Since the US is a wealthy liberal country, as are many of our allies, terrorism would appear to be at least a serious national security problem, if not a serious problem.
Terrorists sound very similar to militaries of our geopolitical rivals of past and present, except for the substate part. So, instead of comparing terrorists to lightening strikes, we should probably compare them to illiberal geopolitical rivals (and not necessarily in terms of deaths caused this year). For example, we might ask whether more or fewer resources should be allocated to counter terrorism vs. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, etc.. I don’t really know, but I suspect that state actors are actually a more serious problem than terrorists given how much power and resources state actors have.
Zeke5123
Sep 17 2018 at 9:05am
Prof. Henderson,
This ignores the black swan potential of a terrorist attack cf. to car crashes. It’s hard for the worst car crash to kill more than 100 people. It’s easy to imagine a terrorist attack killing millions of people if a nuclear bomb was ever obtained and used. Thus, a single terrorist attack can likely dwarf all of the prior car crash fatalities.
This is the turkey problem — when dealing with fat tail potential past performance is not a predictor of future results.
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