A thought about risk assessment and government programs

Politician: Your taxes are protecting you from rampaging elephants.
Citizen: But there aren't any elephants here.
Politician: See how effectively we use your taxes!

We could look up the magnitude of risks such as automobile accidents, illegal drugs, or guns. They are all real, with thousands of deaths per year. However, most people do not do so.

We can not get data on the magnitude of the risk from terrorism. We only know the results of terrorist attacks that succeed, while government officials tell us that terrorists are sometimes foiled

We know that there we are subject to cognitive biases. (Click here for a list of cognitive biases.) But we seldom seem to protect ourselves from those biases as we make decisions about risks and risk amelioration.

I wonder if the American public is not allowing the government to spend too much on security, when different use of the money could save more lives, prevent more incapacity and improve health and welfare. For example, would we not have achieved more real security for our people by spending less on homeland security and war in this century, and more on health insurance and public health. Indeed, would we not have achieved more by having a health service financing system that spent less on paperwork, thereby devoting more to health services? Might we not have achieved more with government regulations that encouraged more on preventive services and less on defensive medicine (e.g. diagnostic procedures that protect the provider from suites rather than provide information to improve treatment).

When a significant industry provides economic benefits for a lot of people by spending tax payer money, those people have an interest in the flow of funds to their industry. If the tax payers fear of risk can be harnessed to support the creation of a government-financed program implemented through that industry, the people it employs benefit. Once such a program is created, lobbyists can be employed to encourage politicians to continue and expand the program. If (and unfortunately often, when) citizens don't accurately understand the risks that are ameliorated and the cost of the program, the lobbyists will win and the tax payers lose.

One aspect of this phenomenon is mission creep. The war in Iraq was sold to the public on the basis that it would avert the risk of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction being used against Americans, and especially falling into the hands of non-state actors and used by terrorists. There were no WMDs in Iraq, but the public was told, "you broke it, you own it". The mission became control of insurgency and nation building.

Similarly, we promoted regime change in Afghanistan in order to install a regime that would oppose the use of that country as a safe haven for terrorists that targeted the United States. We took troops away from the fight against terrorists in Afghanistan in order to deploy them in the Iraq war. Then we found ourselves fighting insurgents in Afghanistan and trying to build sustainable political and economic institutions in that country. It is not clear how much security from terrorist attacks those actions actually bought us, but it seems very likely that other policies in Afghanistan would have brought greater benefits in terms of security of Americans.

On the other hand, the military industrial complex got huge amounts of funding from these war policies. Unfortunately, we don't seem to count the deaths, disabilities and injuries suffered by the people who actually fought these wars nor to compare the actual damages to them with the likely damage that might have been caused by terrorists in the United States.

You don't see this happening often in the United States.