Arkady
President
After the Sandy Hook massacre, gun enthusiasts, looking to offer up some ideas for curbing gun violence in schools without implementing first-world-style gun control, suggested that we could put armed guards in our public schools. At the time, I ran some back-of-the-envelope numbers showing why that was impractical. In short, in order to hire decently trained guards for all our public schools, you'd be talking about a monumental cost, and even if you imagine an absurd best-case scenario for effectiveness (e.g., stopping 1/2 of all schoolhouse homicides), you still have a cost-per-life-saved that is so high as to constitute a completely impractical way to spend our money.
That may sound cold. After all, if it costs $50 million to save one innocent kindergartener's life, who am I to say that it's not worth it? But the problem, as I pointed out, is opportunity cost. If spending $5 billion to save 100 lives causes you to forego other spending options that would have saved 1000 lives with the same $5 billion, then that's a net loss of 900 lives. I think this recent story illustrates that point better than my abstract words could:
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/18/school_nurse_cuts_killed_my_daughter_laporshia_massey_died_because_our_priorities_are_wrong/
Basically, a girl died of asthma at a school where tight budgets meant no nurses and little training for teachers in dealing with life-threatening problems. This one struck very close to home for me, since in tenth grade one of my classmates died of an asthma attack on a school bus while our history class was on a field trip.
I don't know whether my classmate might have survived if the bus driver or teachers had been better trained to deal with such emergencies, and I don't know if the girl in that story might have lived if the school had more funding for handling medical problems. But those are statistical possibilities. And that's exactly the kind of spending you can expect to get stingier if school budgets are strained by hiring a bunch of armed guards to deal with tragic, but exceedingly rare, school killings.
You can also think of the spending-efficiency equation outside the context of direct government spending, and instead in terms of regulatory costs. For example, roughly 3400 Americans die of asthma per year, and asthma costs the country around $56 billion, in terms of medical costs and lost productivity, and every year asthma becomes alarmingly more prevalent. There are a lot of theories about why that is, but one theory has to do with declining air quality. Picture if the government could impose new air quality regulations on power plants and diesel engines, which would cost people, generally, $5 billion per year, while resulting in a 10% decline in asthma. That would more than pay for itself, indirectly (a 10% decline in the $56 billion annual asthma cost). And $5 billion is a lot less than it would cost to hire an armed guard for each of our roughly 100,000 public schools. I'm not advocating that particular regulation, but just using it to illustrate the concept of "regulatory spending" as a choice society makes that should be subject to opportunity-cost analysis, just like direct government spending.
That may sound cold. After all, if it costs $50 million to save one innocent kindergartener's life, who am I to say that it's not worth it? But the problem, as I pointed out, is opportunity cost. If spending $5 billion to save 100 lives causes you to forego other spending options that would have saved 1000 lives with the same $5 billion, then that's a net loss of 900 lives. I think this recent story illustrates that point better than my abstract words could:
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/18/school_nurse_cuts_killed_my_daughter_laporshia_massey_died_because_our_priorities_are_wrong/
Basically, a girl died of asthma at a school where tight budgets meant no nurses and little training for teachers in dealing with life-threatening problems. This one struck very close to home for me, since in tenth grade one of my classmates died of an asthma attack on a school bus while our history class was on a field trip.
I don't know whether my classmate might have survived if the bus driver or teachers had been better trained to deal with such emergencies, and I don't know if the girl in that story might have lived if the school had more funding for handling medical problems. But those are statistical possibilities. And that's exactly the kind of spending you can expect to get stingier if school budgets are strained by hiring a bunch of armed guards to deal with tragic, but exceedingly rare, school killings.
You can also think of the spending-efficiency equation outside the context of direct government spending, and instead in terms of regulatory costs. For example, roughly 3400 Americans die of asthma per year, and asthma costs the country around $56 billion, in terms of medical costs and lost productivity, and every year asthma becomes alarmingly more prevalent. There are a lot of theories about why that is, but one theory has to do with declining air quality. Picture if the government could impose new air quality regulations on power plants and diesel engines, which would cost people, generally, $5 billion per year, while resulting in a 10% decline in asthma. That would more than pay for itself, indirectly (a 10% decline in the $56 billion annual asthma cost). And $5 billion is a lot less than it would cost to hire an armed guard for each of our roughly 100,000 public schools. I'm not advocating that particular regulation, but just using it to illustrate the concept of "regulatory spending" as a choice society makes that should be subject to opportunity-cost analysis, just like direct government spending.
