The Cost of Fear

Come, friends, and lose faith in humanity with me. Earlier today, a friend of mine shared this link with me: http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2010/09/14/paper-to-readers-sorry-for-portraying-muslims-as-human/ Yes, it's exactly as dumb as the title suggests. What the hell, America? Seriously, what the hell?

Once I was done raging, I started thinking, and then I started researching. The same friend pointed me to a fantastic comment made on Fark.com by a user called Xai. Here is a the most interesting part: "Whenever you say that it is to protect yourselves from whoever then again ask yourselves is it worth it? America spends well over $300billion/year on anti-terrorism measures, and while to most people a sum that large has little meaning, if you assume that you have prevented an atrocity as large as 9/11 every single year for the last 10 years then the cost would be $100,000,000 per american life saved. I am willing to bet that if you spent even $10million/year on policing, safety improvements or simply healthcare you would save many american lives."

I hadn't really considered the financial cost/benefit approach to combating terror, but this post got me thinking about it. Let's do some math:

The attacks on September 11, 2001 killed 3000 and wounded 6000. (Source: Wikipedia) Common home fires kill 3500 and wound 20000 Americans every year. (Source: US Fire Administration) A 5 person fire department takes about $900,000 per year to operate. (http://www.newellvfd.org/value.htm) So for $100,000,000, the theoretical cost of saving one life in the above example (which is quite generous, as it assumes an attack on the scale of the WTC attack every year), you could operate 111 fire departments, each of which would surely save more than 1 life per year. After all, with 3500 per year killed in fires, we could certainly use more fire fighters.

But no, fires aren't scary. We have to keep pouring money into the possibility of future terrorism, rather than deal with the ever present and very real threats of crime, fires, natural disasters (anyone remember Katrina?), poor education, injury and disease. I haven't done the research yet, but I bet $300 billion would pay for a lot of police departments, hospitals and schools.

tl;dr wtf America, wake up