Posner forgets himself again

Sebastian, your point is better directed against Posner. He’s not arguing for a more comprehensive BC analysis than the one Kieran has sketched. Rather he’s claiming such a thing is impossible.

His final point “better safe than sorry” is just our old friend the precautionary principle. I have some sympathy for this, but until now Posner has not.

Finally, I had you pegged as something of a libertarian. Are you saying that personal liberty is less valuable than motor transport? If not, won’t consideration of the benefits side of the analysis strengthen the case against police state measures?

BTW John and I cross-posted.

“Are you saying that personal liberty is less valuable than motor transport? If not, won’t consideration of the benefits side of the analysis strengthen the case against police state measures?”

I don’t think it can be analyzed at the level of abstraction. Motor transport adds quite a bit to personal liberty. Not getting your door busted down in erroneous terrorist crackdown does too. ‘Police State Measures’ come in different sizes and shapes. Are we talking about torturing people or wiretapping foreign conversations?

Sebastian, I believe that the point of the post was that Posner was quite willing to slap probabilities and cost/benefits on things like people getting killed – until it came to something which would cut against Bush’s power. Then, he wanted to throw that out, basically planting an arbitrarily high cost to a terrorist attack, to get the decision that he wanted.

Posner is just distinguishing, rather conventionally, between risk (where the probability of the bad event is known) and uncertainty (where it isn’t). He just wrote a book about what public policy should do about events that are cataclysmic in their impact and difficult to assess in their probability.

True, “better safe than sorry” sounds like a bad version of the precautionary principle. The obvious objection is that there is no “safe” choice, for civil liberties any more than for food. If we give the government more power, there are risks. If we don’t, there are risks.

Posner is notoriously uninterested in privacy, which he thinks is incoherent, so that might explain some of this.

Personally, my concern is less with the spying and more with the Administration claiming it has inherent power to ignore the law.

I suppose they should comment on this one from Posner as well:

Good comments, and mostly supportive though some skeptical along the lines of climate models are complex, climate science is uncertain, the experts may be wrong. All true; but reading the skeptical literature, I am reminded of the debates in the 1960s over the effects of cigarette smoking on human health. The evidence for serious ill effects was already very strong, but there were skeptics, some financed by the tobacco industry, who said such things as: the evidence is statistical, the mechanism by which nicotine and tars cause changes in lung tissue, etc. is not well understood, and in short we can’t be certain that there are these effects—the implication being that we should do nothing. Similar points are made today, often by energy companies or persons in their pay, and similarly insinuating that, given uncertainty, we should do nothing.

That is a non sequitur. We rarely have the luxury of being able to act on certainties; you’d be a fool if, credibly informed that unless you had an operation to repair an aneurysm you had a 99 percent chance of dying within a week, you responded that you only act when you’re certain. In my last posting, I speculated that a 1 percent chance of criminal punishment might deter certain copyright violations, and I didn’t mean that only the irrational would be deterred.

What would be irrational would be to conclude, from the fact that a minority of scientists deride global warming fears, that we should ignore the problem. Indeed, if you look at their grounds for skepticism, you may become more alarmed about global warming rather than less so. Because what you will learn is that their skepticism is based mainly on the existence of profound uncertainties about climate, and those uncertainties cut both ways and by doing so imply added rather than diminished risk. For example, skeptics point out that in the earth’s prehistory there have been periods (one roughly 10,000 years ago) in which the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere spiked, even though cavemen didn’t drive SUVs. Yes, and if one of those non-human-induced spikes coincided with our human-induced spiking, we’ll be in real trouble.

I mentioned in passing, in the preceding posting, risk aversion. If you would rather pay $100 certain than run a 1 percent risk of a $9,999 loss, even though the expected cost of such a risk is only $99.99, then you’re risk averse (think of the $100 as an insurance premium). The greater the variance in possible outcomes, the more upset the risk averse are likely to be. The more uncertainty there is about climate, the greater the variance in possible consequences of increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (and of other greenhouse gases, such as methane, which is even more heat-retentive than carbon dioxide, and is being released into the atmosphere in increased quantity because of the melting of the Alaskan and Siberian permafrost—and you can see what a dangerous feedback effect is possible as more methane in the atmosphere raises surface temperatures which melts more permafrost releasing more methane…). So people who are risk averse, and that is most of us when we are facing potential disaster on the scale that global warming might inflict, will not be reassured by people who ground their global warming skepticism in nothing solider than a reminder that other things besides human activity affect climate; those other things seem as likely to exacerbate the effects of human activity as to offset them.

“Are we talking about torturing people or wiretapping foreign conversations?”

Both, presumably. The Administration is doing both and using the same arguments in each case.

This is one reason not to try and apply benefit-cost analysis on a case-by-case basis. Each breach of freedom (including past breaches under Clinton, Reagan, FDR and so on) prepares the ground for more.

BTW, slapping arbitrarily high costs to an event can skew the C-B analysis. How many biowarfare experts think that a 100 million death attack is at all credible?

Funny, I just had dinner w/little Bro’ tonight-just home from his own Iraq war & was thinking of this very thing as I listened to how his talk had changed…

The car analogy (and its problems) is good. I think the thing about c/b w/r/t “war on terror” is: someone else is, more or less, bearing the cost in most people’s analysis (such as it exists). So, if you asked me, “Would you sacrifice X’s chance of survival to increase your own (and many Y-percent of your friends/relatives) by Z percent, would you?” I might very well answer, “Yes.” Especially if that someone else were, say, an Iraqi. The math, anyway, is heavily on “my” side… especially given how easy it is to underestimate how tenuous are our connections to other people–or undervalue them (as history & psychologists have shown repeatedly).

Now, I wouldn’t, because I find the effects of militarism/national security state/unconscionable casualties/blowback too terrible to justify our current war in Iraq–but it’s not hard for me to see how people could make this analysis, and if you can’t, then you really don’t understand much about the way humans think–or why we’re so susceptible to the criminal government with which we’re currently stuck.

The question, then, becomes, “How to get people to think beyond themselves/more deeply about long-term effects to themselves”–honestly? That may just be impossible, as witness the horrible, bloody, 20th century.

C’mon, it is perfectly clear what Posner is doing and has always done. He starts with his preferred conclusion and picks his numbers to fit. Assigning him any credibility whatsoever is foolish. It is only that this time he jumped the shark.

Barbar, I didn’t mean to suggest that Posner was using arbitrarily high numbers, just that the focus was on extreme cases. That is, in considering the threat of a terrorist attack, he doesn’t focus much on the possibility of, say, a repeat of the anthrax attacks of 2001, but instead focuses on scenarios killing millions.

As I understand it, Posner, when addressing these issues in more detail (that is, in his book on the subject and not in a real-time online chat), does try to focus on actual costs and benefits. (I’ll quote a sample of that kind from his blog, at the bottom.) He also, as I understand it, supplies some reasons for thinking that people systematically underestimate the risks posed by low probability events.

Here’s another bit from his blog:

The Indian Ocean tsunami illustrates a type of disaster to which policymakers pay too little attention—a disaster that has a very low or unknown probability of occurring, but that if it does occur creates enormous losses. Great as the death toll, physical and emotional suffering of survivors, and property damage caused by the recent tsunami are, even greater losses could be inflicted by other disasters of low (but not negligible) or unknown probability. The asteroid that exploded above Siberia in 1908 with the force of a hydrogen bomb might have killed millions of people had it exploded above a major city. Yet that asteroid was only about 200 feet in diameter, and a much larger one (among the thousands of dangerously large asteroids in orbits that intersect the earth’s orbit) could strike the earth and cause the total extinction of the human race through a combination of shock waves, fire, tsunamis, and blockage of sunlight, wherever it struck. Other catastrophic risks include, besides earthquakes such as the one that caused the recent tsunami, natural epidemics (the 1918–1919 Spanish influenza epidemic killed between 20 and 40 million people), nuclear or biological attacks by terrorists, certain types of lab accident, and abrupt global warming. The probability of catastrophes resulting, whether or not intentionally, from human activity appears to be increasing because of the rapidity and direction of technological advances.

The fact that a catastrophe is very unlikely to occur is not a rational justification for ignoring the risk of its occurrence. Suppose that a tsunami as destructive as the Indian Ocean one occurs on average once a century and kills 150,000 people. That is an average of 1,500 deaths per year. Even without attempting a sophisticated estimate of the value of life to the people exposed to the risk, one can say with some confidence that if an annual death toll of 1,500 could be substantially reduced at moderate cost, the investment would be worthwhile. A combination of educating the residents of low-lying coastal areas about the warning signs of a tsunami (tremors and a sudden recession in the ocean), establishing a warning system involving emergency broadcasts, telephoned warnings, and air-raid-type sirens, and improving emergency response systems, would have saved many of the people killed by the Indian Ocean tsunami, probably at a total cost below any reasonable estimate of the average losses that can be expected from tsunamis. Relocating people away from coasts would be even more efficacious, but except in the most vulnerable areas or in areas in which residential or commercial uses have only marginal value, the costs would probably exceed the benefits. For annual costs of protection must be matched with annual, not total, expected costs of tsunamis.

In my book Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford University Press 2004), I try to be more precise about how one might determine the costs of catastrophes. There is now a substantial economic literature inferring the value of life from the costs people are willing to incur to avoid small risks of death; if from behavior toward risk one infers that a person would pay $70 to avoid a 1 in 100,000 risk of death, his value of life would be estimated at $7 million ($70/.00001), which is in fact the median estimate of the value of life of an American. Because value of life is positively correlated with income, this figure cannot be used to estimate the value of life of most of the people killed by the Indian Ocean tsunami. A further complication is that the studies may not be robust with respect to risks of death much smaller than the 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 range of most of the studies; we do not know what the risk of death from a tsunami was to the people killed. Additional complications come from the fact that undoubtedly more than 150,000 people have died or will die—and the total may never be known—and that there is vast suffering and property damage that must also be quantified, as well as estimates needed of just how effective precautionary measures of various scope and expense would have been. The risks of smaller but also still destructive tsunamis that such measures might protect against must also be factored in; nor am I confident about my “once a century” risk estimate. Nevertheless, it seems apparent that the total cost figure of the recent tsunami will come in at an amount great enough to indicate that there were indeed precautionary measures to take that would have been cost-justified.

Why, then, weren’t such measures taken in anticipation of a tsunami on the scale that occurred? Tsunamis are a common consequence of earthquakes, which themselves are common; and tsunamis can have other causes besides earthquakes—a major asteroid strike in an ocean would create a tsunami that would dwarf the Indian Ocean one.

There are a number of reasons for such neglect. First, although a once-in-a-century event is as likely to occur at the beginning of the century as at any other time, it is much less likely to occur in the first decade of the century than later. Politicians with limited terms of office and thus foreshortened political horizons are likely to discount low-risk disaster possibilities, since the risk of damage to their careers from failing to take precautionary measures is truncated. Second, to the extent that effective precautions require governmental action, the fact that government is a centralized system of control makes it difficult for officials to respond to the full spectrum of possible risks against which cost-justified measures might be taken. The officials, given the variety of matters to which they must attend, are likely to have a high threshold of attention below which risks are simply ignored. Third, where risks are regional or global rather than local, many national governments, especially in the poorer and smaller countries, may drag their heels in the hope of taking a free ride on the larger and richer countries. Knowing this, the latter countries may be reluctant to take precautionary measures and by doing so reward and thus encourage free riding. Fourth, countries are poor often because of weak, inefficient, or corrupt government, characteristics that may disable poor nations from taking cost-justified precautions. Fifth, people have difficulty thinking in terms of probabilities, especially very low probabilities, which they tend therefore to write off. This weakens political support for incurring the costs of taking precautionary measures against low-probability disasters.

The operation of some of these factors is illustrated by the refusal of the Pacific nations, which do have a tsunami warning system, to extend their system to the Indian Ocean prior to the recent catastrophe. Tsunamis are more common in the Pacific, and most of the Pacific nations do not abut on the Indian Ocean, but even if the risk of an Indian Ocean tsunami was only a tenth of that of a Pacific Ocean tsunami (a figure I have seen in a newspaper article), it was still worth taking precautions against; but there is a tendency to write down slight risks to zero.

An even more dramatic example of neglect of low-probability/high-cost risks concerns the asteroid menace, which is analytically similar to the menace of tsunamis. NASA, with an annual budget of more than $10 billion, spends only $4 million a year on mapping dangerously close large asteroids, and at that rate may not complete the task for another decade, even though such mapping is the key to an asteroid defense because it may give us years of warning. Deflecting an asteroid from its orbit when it is still millions of miles from the earth is a feasible undertaking. In both cases, slight risks of terrible disasters are largely ignored essentially for political reasons.

In part because tsunamis are one of the risks of an asteroid collision, the Indian Ocean disaster has stimulated new intereset in asteroid defense. This is welcome. The fact that a disaster of a particular type has not occurred recently or even within human memory (or even ever) is a bad reason to ignore it. The risk may be slight, but if the consequences should it materialize are great enough, the expected cost of disaster may be sufficient to warrant defensive measures.

Are we talking about torturing people or wiretapping foreign conversations?

As I’ve mentioned before, give me the second with no checks and balances and with a little bit of ingenuity I’ll deliver you the first.

if the cost of an action is less than the benefit of the action, then cost-benefit analysis recommends that you do that action.

I’m not talking about the cost benefit analysis, I’m talking about Kieran’s setup of “here he uses probabilities, here he doesn’t”. Posner’s arguments are crap in both quotes, but that doesn’t make Kieran’s objection valid.

Is it possible that Posner just made a mistake in the chat session? I presume it was in real-time and he had to answer on the go, so maybe he just took the question on its terms and replied accordingly. If people were judged by their conversation, then I doubt very many would turn out to be consistent. On the other hand, if Posner has made a similar point in any of his writings, then he would seem to be fair game.

a, Posner was undoubtedly prepped and ready; the questions probably were screened, and not answered in true real time (i.e., q#1 blocked, q2 delayed while q3 was anwered, etc.). Also, as has been pointed out, he’s played C-B games quite often.

Geoff, the word that seems to fit is ‘consequentialist’, I believe.

well, daniel a) I was extremely tired… and b) I didn’t support the war anyway–still don’t, but it looks like consequentialists have even less leg to stand on than even their best devil’s advocate could hope for (unless they think we’re going to lose ~5M in an attack).

Posner on the Precautionary Principle:

“The ‘precautionary principle’ (‘better safe than sorry’) popular in Europe is not a useful alternative to cost-benefit analysis, if only because of its sponginess.”

Unless following it gives Bush kinglike power, then I guess it’s ok.