Social Science

Does Means-Tested Welfare Affect Family Formation?

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Do the marriage penalties of the welfare system have effects on family formation? According to a 2016 AEI/IFS report, the evidence is mixed:

  1. Our data show that the presence of marriage penalties does not affect marriage patterns among unmarried couples in urban America who have just had a baby, or among couples with children two and under whose income falls close to the lower threshold of the marriage penalty facing such couples, that is, for couples whose joint income is close to a level where they would still qualify for means-tested benefits were they to marry. Most in this latter group are in the lowest two quintiles of family income for families with children two and under (less than $48,000). We also find no evidence that marriage penalties associated with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) reduce the odds of marriage among lower-income couples.
  2. However, we do find that couples whose oldest child is two or younger whose income falls closer to the upper threshold of the marriage penalty—couples where each partner’s individual income is near the cut-off for means-tested benefits—are about two to four percentage points less likely to be married if they face a marriage penalty in Medicaid eligibility or food stamps. Most of these couples are in the second and third quintiles of family income for families with children two and under ($24,000 to $79,000).
  3. Almost one-third of Americans aged 18 to 60 report that they personally know someone who has not married for fear of losing means-tested benefits.

You can see the full report here.

The State of Social Mobility Research

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Brookings scholars Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill have an informative article in the Milken Institute Review that provides a nice summary of the research on social mobility. “So how are we doing?” they ask.

The good news is that economic standards of living have improved over time. Most children are therefore better off than their parents. Among children born in the 1970s and 1980s, 84 percent had higher incomes (even after adjusting for inflation) than their parents did at a similar age, according to a Pew study. Absolute upward income mobility, then, has been strong, and has helped children from every income class, especially those nearer the bottom of the ladder. More than 9 in 10 of those born into families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution have been upwardly mobile in this absolute sense.

That’s good news, but “[t]here’s a catch…Strong absolute mobility goes hand in hand with strong economic growth. So it is quite likely that these rates of generational progress will slow, since the potential growth rate of the economy has probably diminished.” Furthermore, “[i]f you are born to parents in the poorest fifth of the income distribution, your chance of remaining stuck in that income group is around 35 to 40 percent. If you manage to be born into a higher-income family, the chances are similarly good that you will remain there in adulthood. It would be wrong, however, to say that class positions are fixed. There is still a fair amount of fluidity or social mobility in America – just not as much as most people seem to believe or want. Relative mobility is especially sticky in the tails at the high and low end of the distribution. Mobility is also considerably lower for blacks than for whites, with blacks much less likely to escape from the bottom rungs of the ladder. Equally ominously, they are much more likely to fall down from the middle quintile.”

But are these rates of relative mobility getting worse? “Current evidence suggests not. In fact, the trend line for relative mobility has been quite flat for the past few decades, according to work by Raj Chetty of Stanford and his co-researchers. It is simply not the case that the amount of intergenerational relative mobility has declined over time.”

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Some other interesting points:

  • “Interestingly, the most recent research suggests that the United States stands out most for its lack of downward mobility from the top.”
  • “Pioneering work (again by Raj Chetty and his colleagues) shows that some cities have much higher rates of upward mobility than others. From a mobility perspective, it is better to grow up in San Francisco, Seattle or Boston than in Atlanta, Baltimore or Detroit. Families that move to these high-mobility communities when their children are still relatively young enhance the chances that the children will have more education and higher incomes in early adulthood. Greater mobility can be found in places with better schools, fewer single parents, greater social capital, lower income inequality and less residential segregation.”
  • The Social Genome Project “tracks children’s progress through multiple life stages with a corresponding set of success measures at the end of each…Three findings from the model stand out. First, it’s clear that success is a cumulative process. According to our measures, a child who is ready for school at age 5 is almost twice as likely to be successful at the end of elementary school as one who is not…Children who get off track at an early age frequently get back on track at a later age; it’s just that their chances are not nearly as good. So this is a powerful argument for intervening early in life. But it is not an argument for giving up on older youth.”
  • “Second, the chances of clearing our last hurdle – being middle class by middle age (specifically, having an income of around $68,000 for a family of four by age 40) – vary quite significantly. A little over half of all children born in the 1980s and 1990s achieved this goal. But those who are black or born into low-income families were very much less likely than others to achieve this benchmark.”
  • “Third, the effect of a child’s circumstances at birth is strong. We use a multidimensional measure here, including not just the family’s income but also the mother’s education, the marital status of the parents and the birth weight of the child. Together, these factors have substantial effects on a child’s subsequent success. Maternal education seems especially important.”

Check out the full article.

Doing Business 2017

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The World Bank’s latest Doing Business report has been released. The report “measures regulations affecting 11 areas of the life of a business. Ten of these areas are included in this year’s ranking on the ease of doing business: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency. Doing Business also measures labor market regulation, which is not included in this year’s ranking.”

Its key findings are as follows:

  • Doing Business 2017: Equal Opportunity for All finds that entrepreneurs in 137 economies saw improvements in their local regulatory framework last year. Between June 2015 and June 2016, the report, which measures 190 economies worldwide, documented 283 business reforms. Reforms reducing the complexity and cost of regulatory processes in the area of starting a business were the most common in 2015/16, as in the previous year. The next most common reforms were in the areas of paying taxes, getting credit and trading across borders. Read about business reforms.
  • Brunei Darussalam, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Belarus, Indonesia, Serbia, Georgia, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain were the most improved economies in 2015/16 in areas tracked by Doing Business. Together, these 10 top improvers implemented 48 regulatory reforms making it easier to do business.
  • Economies in all regions are implementing reforms easing the process of doing business, but Europe and Central Asia continues to be the region with the highest share of economies implementing at least one reform—96% of economies in the region have implemented at least one business regulatory reform.
  • Doing Business includes a gender dimension in four of the 11 topics sets. Starting a business, registering property and enforcing contracts present a gender dimension for the first time this year. Labor market regulation already captured gender disaggregated data in last year’s report.
  • This year’s report expands the paying taxes topic set to cover postfiling processes—what happens after a firm pays taxes—such as tax refunds, tax audits and administrative tax appeals.
  • This year’s report also includes an annex with analysis on a pilot indicator on public procurement regulations.
  • The report features six case studies in the areas of getting electricity, getting credit: legal rights, getting credit: credit information, protecting minority investors, paying taxes and trading across borders as well as two annexes in the areas of labor market regulation and selling to the government. The case studies and annexes either present new indicators or provide further insights from the data collected through methodology changes implemented in the past two years. See all case studies.

A number of things jumped out at me. First off, the rankings of the oft-praised Nordic countries, particularly Denmark and Sweden. See how those two countries compare to the U.S. below.

World Bank Rankings Denmark Sweden U.S.
Overall 3 9 8
Starting a business 24 15 51
Construction permits 6 25 39
Getting electricity 14 6 36
Registering property 12 10 36
Getting credit 32 75 2
Protecting minority investors 19 19 41
Paying taxes 7 28 36
Trading across borders 1 18 35
Enforcing contracts 24 22 20
Resolving insolvency 8 19 5

Denmark ranks higher than the United States with Sweden only a spot behind. Yet, in both Denmark and Sweden it is easier to

  • Start a business
  • Get a construction permit
  • Get electricity
  • Register property
  • Protect minority investors
  • Pay taxes
  • Trade across borders

As Will Wilkinson put it, “[Y]ou cannot finance a Danish-style welfare state without free markets and large tax increases on the middle class. If you want Danish levels of social spending, you need Danish middle-class tax rates and a relatively unfettered capitalist economy.”

However, the next few graphs are probably some of the most interesting bits of the report:

As the report explains,

research shows that where business regulation is simpler and more accessible, firms start smaller and firm size can be a proxy for the income of the entrepreneur. Doing Business data confirms this notion. There is a negative association between the Gini index, which measures income inequality within an economy, and the distance to frontier score, which measures the quality and efficiency of business regulation when the data are compared over time (figure 1.8).

Data across multiple years and economies show that as economies improve business regulation, income inequality tends to decrease in parallel. Although these results are associations and do not imply causality, it is important to see such relation. The results differ by regulatory area. Facilitating entry and exit in and out of the market—as measured by the starting a business and resolving insolvency indicators—have the strongest link with income inequality reduction (figures 1.9 and 1.10). These two Doing Business indicators are focused on equalizing opportunities and access to markets (pgs. 11-12).

In short, lower income inequality is correlated with simpler, business-friendly regulations. Anyone worried about income inequality should take note.

I recommend taking a look at the data for yourself. Lots of good stuff.

The Rich Are Selfish, Right?

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“[The rich] evade taxes more often, flaunt traffic laws that protect pedestrians and donate less frequently to charity. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, there has been no shortage of reports in the popular media on their selfishness and opportunism,” write three economists at The Conversation. “…But are the rich really so different from the rest of us? In recently published research, we used a natural field experiment to try to find out.”

Their first focus is incentives and opportunities:

For instance, because rich people face a higher tax bracket, every dollar of income they hide from the tax collector benefits them more than it would a poor person. Similarly, although both rich and poor get the same penalty for a traffic law violation, a fine that would be devastating for a person in poverty amounts to a pinprick for someone who’s wealthy. And while the rich are less likely to give to charity in any one year, they instead tend to make large gifts later in their lives. So even if the rich often do behave more selfishly than the less well off, their behavior might be more the result of different circumstances rather than differing moral values.

But what does their experiment show?:

[W]e designed a field experiment in which we “misdelivered” transparent envelopes with money to over 400 rich and poor households in a medium-sized city in the Netherlands. Returning envelopes is individually costly (mostly in terms of time) but benefits the rightful recipient, making this an altruistic, “pro-social” act.

All the envelopes contained €5 (US$5.34) or €20 as well as a card with a message from a grandfather to his grandson explaining the gift. We sent the money, however, in two variations: either as banknotes that could be easily seen by anyone handling the envelope, or as a bank transfer card, which is a slip of paper that orders a bank to send money from one account to another. In other words, the cash acted as “bait,” while the bank transfer card would have had no value to the individual.

Our setup had two advantages over other studies on the topic. First, participants did not know they were being studied as part of an experiment. They were, therefore, not changing their choices for fear of what we might think of them. Second, there was no “selection bias” in our data that might have skewed the results because the rich tend to shy away from participating in experiments (possibly because they don’t have much time to participate or don’t like the idea of researchers having data on them). In our setup, every rich or poor household was randomly selected.

The overall results showed that the rich returned roughly 80 percent of all envelopes, regardless of whether it contained cash or a card. When cash was used, the rich returned only slightly less. So the rich were somewhat sensitive to the money bait, but not much. The poor, however, were much less likely to go to the trouble of returning the money and were much more vulnerable to the bait inside the envelope. They kept roughly half of the noncash envelopes and roughly three-quarters of the cash envelopes.

Does this mean the poor are the truly selfish ones? Not necessarily. In line with the point about incentives and opportunities above, the researchers used “a theoretical model” to “measure a household’s “neediness” of the cash and how financial stress changes over the course of a month. When we do so, as one might expect, we find big differences in needs and stresses between rich and poor. But what is more important is that, when we statistically remove the influence of these factors, we no longer find differences in the relative altruism of the rich versus the poor.”

They conclude,

These findings show the perils of inferring deeper motives from casual behavior. While our raw data show clear differences between the rich and poor in terms of pro-social behavior, digging a little deeper erases them. Our conclusion is that incentives are the biggest determinants of pro-social behavior and that neither the rich nor the poor are inherently kinder or more selfish – in the end all of us are susceptible to behaving this way…This is not to absolve those who evade taxes or break the law. What it suggests is that the rich are no different than the rest: If we were to put the poor in their place, they would likely behave similarly.

Want Fewer Deaths and Fewer DUIs? Ride Uber

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Remember when people were peddling that #deleteUber nonsense? Well, here’s a few more reasons to hate Uber according to a 2016 study:

Using a differences-in-differences specification and controlling for county-specific linear trends, we find that the entry of ride-sharing tends to decrease fatal vehicular crashes. Our (unweighted) estimated 1.1 percent decline in vehicle fatalities for each additional quarter are smaller than those found by Greenwood and Wattal (2015).

We…observe declines in arrests for assault and DUI. Specifically, we find that Uber’s entry lowers DUIs rates by 6 to 27 percent. The magnitude of our findings are smaller than those found by Jackson and Owens (2011) who show that DUIs decreased by 40% when the Washington DC Transit Authority expanded late night Metro transportation services. In many cases, these declines become larger the longer the service is available in an area. These beneficial declines are somewhat offset by increases in arrests for motor vehicle thefts (pg. 15).

Here are the specifics on fatal accidents:

Our unweighted estimates are consistent with Uber leading to larger declines in fatal accidents the longer the service is available. Fatal crashes decline by 0.5 percent for each additional month or 1.5 percent for each additional quarter Uber is available. Night-time fatal crashes decline by 0.9 percent for each additional month or 2.7 percent per quarter. The number of fatalities decline by 0.37 percent for each additional month or 1.1 percent for each additional quarter Uber is available. Our estimates are a third of the size as those in Greenwood and Wattal (2015) who find a “3.6% – 5.6% decrease in the rate of motor vehicle homicides per quarter [or 0.9% – 1.4% per month] in the state of California.” In the weighted regressions, the estimated effect over time tends to be smaller and statistically significant. We observe statistically significant and economically meaningful declines in fatal accidents, fatal night time accidents, and the number of fatalities the longer Uber is available.

…Overall, our findings suggest that Uber does not increase overall fatal crash rates and, for some specifications, is associated with a decline in fatal crash rates (pgs. 12-13).

And for various crimes:

The results are similar with and without weights: counties with Uber experience statistically significant declines in arrests for other assaults and DUIs. The magnitudes are economically important and typically larger for the weighted estimates. For other 14 assaults, the entrance of Uber is associated with a 11 to 18 percent decline. The availability of Uber is associated with a 6 to 27 percent decline in DUIs. Counties experience a 55 to 157 percent increases in arrests for motor vehicle thefts after the introduction of Uber. This may come from an increased propensity for Uber passengers to leave personal vehicles parked in public locations.

…For DUIs, we witness a 2.8 to 3.4 percent decline for each additional month of Uber service. We continue to observe declines in arrests for assault; each additional month of Uber availability is associated with a 2.4 percent decline in assaults in the unweighted estimate. The results for motor vehicle thefts are also consistent across specifications with some evidence of increasing thefts over time.

Because we are concerned that Uber may enter areas with characteristics that are correlated with crime rates, we restrict the sample to only those areas where Uber services have been offered…[A]rrests for DUI decline by 17 percent with the entry of Uber. Including both the entry and trend effects, the…estimates reveal a 2.7 to 3.9 percent decline in DUIs for each additional month Uber service is available. Motor vehicle thefts increase following the entry of the ride-sharing service. The results for assaults, however, become statistically insignificant.

Our estimates reveal that the introduction of Uber lowers arrests due to DUIs and may lower assaults. Overall, this suggests that the introduction of Uber increases the safety of citizens. We also witness little to no change in liquor law violations, fraud, or embezzlement. This suggests that our findings are not due to overall declines in crime rates. We do, however, witness an increase in the theft of vehicles (pgs. 13-15).

Safer societies with fewer deaths: not a bad trade-off for “selling out” at JFK airport.

Teachers: Made, Not Born

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Teacher quality matters, according to The Economist:

Many factors shape a child’s success, but in schools nothing matters as much as the quality of teaching. In a study updated last year, John Hattie of the University of Melbourne crunched the results of more than 65,000 research papers on the effects of hundreds of interventions on the learning of 250m pupils. He found that aspects of schools that parents care about a lot, such as class sizes, uniforms and streaming by ability, make little or no difference to whether children learn (see chart). What matters is “teacher expertise”. All of the 20 most powerful ways to improve school-time learning identified by the study depended on what a teacher did in the classroom.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford University, has estimated that during an academic year pupils taught by teachers at the 90th percentile for effectiveness learn 1.5 years’ worth of material. Those taught by teachers at the 10th percentile learn half a year’s worth. Similar results have been found in countries from Britain to Ecuador. “No other attribute of schools comes close to having this much influence on student achievement,” he says.

Rich families find it easier to compensate for bad teachers, so good teaching helps poor kids the most. Having a high-quality teacher in primary school could “substantially offset” the influence of poverty on school test scores, according to a paper co-authored by Mr Hanushek. Thomas Kane of Harvard University estimates that if African-American children were all taught by the top 25% of teachers, the gap between blacks and whites would close within eight years. He adds that if the average American teacher were as good as those at the top quartile the gap in test scores between America and Asian countries would be closed within four years.

…In 2014 Rob Coe of Durham University, in England, noted in a report on what makes great teaching that many commonly used classroom techniques do not work. Unearned praise, grouping by ability and accepting or encouraging children’s different “learning styles” are widely espoused but bad ideas. So too is the notion that pupils can discover complex ideas all by themselves. Teachers must impart knowledge and critical thinking.

But the real question is this: are good teachers born or made? A 2011 “survey of attitudes to education found that such portrayals reflect what people believe: 70% of Americans thought the ability to teach was more the result of innate talent than training.” But the article notes,

Few other professionals are so isolated in their work, or get so little feedback, as Western teachers. Today 40% of teachers in the OECD have never taught alongside another teacher, observed another or given feedback. Simon Burgess of the University of Bristol says teaching is still “a closed-door profession”, adding that teaching unions have made it hard for observers to take notes in classes. Pupils suffer as a result, says Pasi Sahlberg, a former senior official at Finland’s education department. He attributes much of his country’s success to Finnish teachers’ culture of collaboration. As well as being isolated, teachers lack well defined ways of getting better…Much of what passes for “professional development” is woeful, as are the systems for assessing it. In 2011 a study in England found that only 1% of training courses enabled teachers to turn bad practice into good teaching. The story in America is similar. This is not for want of cash. The New Teacher Project, a group that helps cities recruit teachers, estimates that in some parts of America schools shell out about $18,000 per teacher per year on professional development, 4-15 times as much as is spent in other sectors.

The New Teacher Project suggests that after the burst of improvement at the start of their careers teachers rarely get a great deal better. This may, in part, be because they do not know they need to get better. Three out of five low-performing teachers in America think they are doing a great job. Overconfidence is common elsewhere: nine out of ten teachers in the OECD say they are well prepared. Teachers in England congratulate themselves on their use of cognitive-activation strategies, despite the fact that pupil surveys suggest they rely more on rote learning than teachers almost everywhere else.

I’ll stop the overquoting here, but the piece is truly worth reading in its entirety. Our teachers need better training.

Can We Still Be Optimistic With Illiberalism on the Rise?

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The latest Freedom of the World report was recently released with some worrisome–though not surprising–news:

  • With populist and nationalist forces making significant gains in democratic states, 2016 marked the 11th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.
  • There were setbacks in political rights, civil liberties, or both, in a number of countries rated “Free” by the report, including Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Tunisia, and the United States.
  • Of the 195 countries assessed, 87 (45 percent) were rated Free, 59 (30 percent) Partly Free, and 49 (25 percent) Not Free.
  • The Middle East and North Africa region had the worst ratings in the world in 2016, followed closely by Eurasia.

The report is appropriately titled “Populists and Autocrats: The Dual Threat to Global Democracy.” We’ve written about the dangers of populism here at Difficult Run before and how closed societies are detrimental to flourishing. Despite it being “the 11th consecutive year of decline in global freedom,” it’s worth noting the long-term trend:

More people live in democracies than ever before:

Let’s hope this recent downturn in global freedom is just a blip in an overall positive trajectory.

 

Unsatisfied Retirees

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Retirement may not be all it’s cracked up to be. A MarketWatch article reports,

More retirees than ever say they are “not at all satisfied” with retirement, according to a study published this year from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. The institute used data from the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study, collected from 1998 to 2012, in which more than 20,000 people are interviewed every two years.

The number of retirees reporting just moderate satisfaction with retirement increased from 31.7% to 40.9% and those who are completely unsatisfied with retirement climbed above 10%, up from fewer than 8% in 1998. Meanwhile, the number of retirees who say their retirement is “very satisfying” has dropped from 60.5% in 1998 to 48.6% in 2012 — the first time it’s ever dipped below half.

The study authors did not investigate the reasons behind these satisfaction dips, but other studies suggest that some of the reasons may be financial. Research published in 2004 by Constantijn Panis, who has a Ph.D. in economics and is also an expert in demographic issues, found that getting payouts from a pension was positively related to retirement satisfaction. But as the number of retirees drawing on traditional pensions declined — from 1980 to 2008, the proportion of non-government, salaried workers who got a traditional pension fell from 38% to 20% — retirement satisfaction may be dipping accordingly.

…Studies show that today’s retirees want more and varied activities in retirement, including flexible jobs, than did previous generations of retirees. Plus, surveys show that boomers — who are retiring in droves in recent years — are in general less happy than members of the so-called silent generation, and that may be reflected in these numbers.

Of course, it’s worth noting that the overwhelming majority report being satisfied with retirement. We shouldn’t create a crisis where there is none. Nonetheless, the uptick may be something we want to keep an eye on. In the Gallup-published Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, the authors Tom Rath and Jim Harter explore five elements to overall well-being:

  • Career Wellbeing – how one’s time is occupied.
  • Social Wellbeing – the strength of one’s relationships.
  • Financial Wellbeing – effectively managing one’s economic life.
  • Physical Wellbeing – having good health and enough energy on a daily basis.
  • Community Wellbeing – engagement with the area in which one lives.

In regards to Career Wellbeing, Rath and Harter reveal this significant point about the need to work:

One of the more encouraging findings [of one study] was that, even in the face of some of life’s most tragic events like the death of a spouse, after a few years, people do recover to the same level of wellbeing they had before their spouse passed away. But this was not the case for those who were unemployed for a prolonged period of time — particularly not for men. Our wellbeing actually recovers more rapidly from the death of a spouse than it does from a sustained period of unemployment. This doesn’t mean that getting fired will harm your wellbeing forever. The same study also found that being laid off from a job in the last year did not result in any significant long-term changes. The key is to avoid sustained periods of unemployment (more than a year) when you are actively looking for a job but unable to find one. In addition to the obvious loss of income from prolonged unemployment, the lack of regular social contact and the daily boredom might be even more detrimental to your wellbeing.

This is likely why the MarketWatch article encourages retirees to “find things you love to do” and “plan how to use your time.” Wise advice.

What’s Behind Kindness?

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The site for the Greater Good Science Center at the UC Berkeley has an intriguing article examining a study on the motivations behind acts of kindness. Based on a statistical analysis called exploratory factor analysis (EFA), the researchers came up with four categories of human kindness:

  • Genuine kindness (benevolence)
  • Strategic kindness (maximizing gain and avoiding cost or loss)
  • Norm-motivated kindness (reciprocity, helping—and punishing—to uphold fairness)
  • Self-reported kindness

The article states,

The upshot? We’re all inclined towards genuine kindness to different degrees, partly as a function of how we generally feel—and perhaps surprisingly, how smart we are. Beyond genuine kindness, other kinds of kindness are influenced by age, sex, income—and whether or not we have children. By the way, their analyses do not reveal whether one person is more or less kind than another. Rather, they tell a story about where people’s kindness—however scant or abundant—is coming from.

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The research indicates that how we “generally feel—that is, whether we’d characterize ourselves as having more positive or negative feelings in life—influences our tendency towards genuine kindness. For example, having a lower tendency to experience negative emotions is associated with more genuine kindness. In other words, if you’re not often in a bad mood, you’re more likely to behave kindly in an unrequited way.” Furthermore, those “who scored higher on a battery of cognitive, attention, and IQ tests also tended to be more genuinely kind—but no more, or less, likely to exhibit kindness based on strategic or norm-motivated concerns. Nor did they describe themselves as more kind.” Finally, demographics matter. “As people get older, genuine kindness falls. So does norm-motivated kindness. This doesn’t mean that older people are chronically less kind. It just suggests that they may be less concerned with reciprocity, fairness, and reputation—and their kindness hinges more on considering costs and benefits. The researchers observed a similar pattern for monthly income: As income increased, genuine kindness fell, which is consistent with a growing literature on the harmful effects on inequality on the privileged.” Perhaps surprisingly, “people who were parents also scored lower on genuine kindness, while showing no differences on any of the other kindness factors.” And while “women scored higher in self-reported kindness,” this “did not play out for genuinely kind behavior, which was actually more common in men.”

In short, the “study is important because it begins to systematically chart out the mental and behavioral underpinnings and contextual parameters of human kindness, to provide a theoretical blueprint for the growing community of research converging on age-old issues concerning human goodness and survival.”

TSA: A Cost-Benefit Analysis

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Is the TSA worth the cost? According to Vox, the answer is likely ‘no’. “The TSA’s inefficiency isn’t just aggravating and unnecessary;” writes Dylan Matthews, “by pushing people to drive instead of fly, it’s actively dangerous and costing lives. Less invasive private scanning would be considerably better. The TSA is hard to evaluate largely because it’s attempting to solve a non-problem. Despite some very notable cases, airplane hijackings and bombings are quite rare. There aren’t that many attempts, and there are even fewer successes. That makes it hard to judge if the TSA is working properly — if no one tries to do a liquid-based attack, then we don’t know if the 3-ounce liquid rule prevents such attacks.”

In order to test the TSA’s effectiveness, Homeland Security officials “pretended to be terrorists, and tried to smuggle guns and bombs onto planes 70 different times. And 67 of those times, the Red Team succeeded. Their weapons and bombs were not confiscated, despite the TSA’s lengthy screening process. That’s a success rate of more than 95 percent.” Granted, the point of the security measures is “to make terrorists change their plans” rather than catch them at the airport. In short, “there’s basically zero evidence the agency has prevented any attacks”:

The TSA claims it won’t provide examples of such cases due to national security, but given its history of bragging about lesser successes, that’s a little tough to believe. For instance, the agency bragged plenty about catching Kevin Brown, an Army vet who tried to check pipe bomb-making materials. Brown wasn’t going to blow up the plane — the unfinished materials were in his checked luggage — but if the TSA publicized that, why wouldn’t it publicize catching someone who was trying to blow up the plane?

 The Government Accountability Office is also skeptical that the TSA is stopping terrorists. It concluded in 2013 that there’s no evidence the agency’s SPOT program, which employed 2,800 as of the study and attempts to scan passengers for suspicious behavior, is at all effective. Only 14 percent of passenger flaggings by TSA officers led to a referral to law enforcement. Only 0.6 percent of TSA flaggings led to an arrest. None of those arrests were designated as terrorism-related.

What about the most loathed TSA rules: the shoe removal requirement, and the ban on all but the tiniest containers of liquids? There’s never been any evidence that these are effective. Remember: We caught the people who tried to attack with their shoes and with liquid explosives, without these rules in place. Europe is gradually phasing out the liquid ban.

Beyond the lack of evidence in favor of the TSA, the agency may actually be leading to more deaths:

One paper by economists Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel Simon found that, controlling for other factors like weather and traffic, 9/11 provoked such a large decrease in air traffic and increase in driving that 327 more people died every month from road accidents. The effect dissipated over time, but the total death toll (up to 2,300) rivals that of the attacks themselves.

Another paper by the same authors found that one post-9/11 security measure — increased checked baggage screening — reduced passenger volume by about 6 percent. Combine the two papers, and you get a disturbing conclusion: In their words, over the course of three months, “approximately 129 individuals died in automobile accidents which resulted from travelers substituting driving for flying in response to inconvenience associated with baggage screening.”

This isn’t just one set of studies; there’s other evidence that 9/11 led to an increase in driving, which cost at least a thousand lives. The 129 deaths per quarter-year figure is, as Nate Silver notes, “the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.”

You can dispute the precise figures here; these are regression analyses, which are hardly perfect. But it stands to reason that having to get to the airport two or three hours before a flight reduces demand for flights relative to a world where you only have to arrive 30 minutes beforehand — particularly for flights on routes where a two- to three-hour wait dramatically increases travel time relative to driving, like New York to Washington, DC, or Boston to New York. That means more driving. That means more death.

That might be worth it for a system that we know for a fact prevents attacks. But there’s no evidence the TSA does…The solution is clear: Airports should kick out the TSA, hire (well-paid and unionized) private screeners, and simply ask people to go through normal metal detectors with their shoes on, their laptops in their bags, and all the liquids they desire. The increased risk would be negligible — and if it gets people to stop driving and start flying, it could save lives.