Disaster Bias
Today begins a conference on Global Catastrophic Risk I’m attending. Coincidentally, Bryan Caplan recently pointed us to a new paper by Andrew Healy:
Using comprehensive data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, I show that voters reward disaster relief spending but not disaster prevention spending. This aspect of voter behavior creates a large distortion in the incentives that governments face, since the data show that prevention spending substantially reduces future damage. … Given mean annual prevention spending of $195 million and mean disaster damage of $16.5 billion, the regression estimates that a $1 increase in prevention spending resulted in a $8.30 decrease in disaster damage, and this estimate captures only benefits that occur in the five years from 2000-2004.
My and other conference presentation describe other disaster biases, such as not paying due attention to the very largest possible disasters, and not make extra preparations against human extinction.
Perhaps the security theatre at airports *is not* in fact to the exceptions in the rest of their paper.
I see that Ron Bailey of the libertarian Reason magazine is blogging the conference. First two posts are TEOTWAKI!! and Will Humanity Survive the 21st Century?.