The Freakonomics blog just moved from being independent to being part of the NY Times' online offering. And on his very first day as part of the NYT family, Levitt launched a debate on a subject that we've been avoiding for the past five years.
In a post entitled "If You Were a Terrorist, How Would You Attack?", Levitt began by outlining his understand of how terrorists think. Then he put out the following call:
I’m sure many readers have far better ideas. I would love to hear them. Consider that posting them 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.
No doubt you know what happened next. Rather than slink away, however, Levitt fired back:
The people e-mailing me can’t 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 wasn’t 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 isn’t really to generate terror. (A separate factor is the prevention efforts by law enforcement and the government; I’ll address that later.)Many of the angry emails 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....
Ultimately, though, it strikes me that there are two possible interpretations of our current situation vis-à-vis terrorism.
One view is the following: the main reason we aren’t currently being decimated by terrorists is that the government’s anti-terror efforts have been successful.
The alternative interpretation is that the terror risk just isn’t 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 can’t 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.
This is precisely right, and it highlights everything that has been wrong with our political discourse since 9/11. Rather than stop and analyze the situation carefully, we've run from one fake crisis to the next, spurred by the very same fears that the attacks on 9/11 were designed to create. The events themselves lasted no more than a few hours, but from a psychological standpoint in many ways the day has never ended.
Kudos to Levitt for using the platform provided by the NYT to launch this long overdue conversation.
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